Robert Silverberg - Downward to the Earth

While this was being decided, several of the sulidoror brought a late breakfast of fruit and lake fish to Gundersen, exactly as though they recognized his authority under the Company. It was a curiously anachronistic gesture, almost servile, not at all like the way in which they had tossed him a raw slab of malidar meat the day before. Then they had been testing him, even taunting him; now they were waiting upon him. He was uncomfortable about that, but he was also quite hungry, and he made a point of asking Srin’gahar to tell him the sulidororu words of thanks. There was no sign that the powerful bipeds were pleased or flattered or amused by his use of their language, though.

They began their journey in late afternoon. The five nildoror moved in single file, Srin’gahar at the back of the group with Gundersen perched on his back; the Earthman did not appear to be the slightest burden for him. Their path led due north along the rim of the great rift, with the mountains that guarded the central plateau rising on their left. By the light of the sinking sun Gundersen stared toward that plateau. Down here in the valley, his surroundings had a certain familiarity; making the necessary allowances for the native plants and animals, he might almost be in some steamy jungle of South America. But the plateau appeared truly alien. Gundersen eyed the thick tangles of spiky purplish moss that festooned and nearly choked the trees along the top of the rift wall. The way the parasitic growth drowned its hosts the trees seemed grisly to him. The wall itself, of some soapy gray-green rock, dotted with angry blotches of crimson lichen and punctuated every few hundred meters by long ropy strands of a swollen blue fungus, cried out its otherworldliness: the soft mineral had never felt the impact of raindrops, but had been gently carved and shaped by the humidity alone, taking on weird knobbinesses and hollows over the millennia. Nowhere on Earth could one see a rock wall like that, serpentine and involute and greasy.

The forest beyond the wall looked impenetrable and vaguely sinister. The silence, the heavy and sluggish air, the sense of dark strangeness, the flexible limbs of the glossy trees bowed almost to the ground by moss, the occasional distant snort of some giant beast, made the central plateau seem forbidding and hostile. Few Earthmen had ever entered it, and it had never been surveyed in detail. The Company once had had some plans for stripping away large patches of jungle up there and putting in agricultural settlements, but nothing had come of the scheme, because of relinquishment. Gundersen had been in the plateau country only once, by accident, when his pilot had had to make a forced landing en route from coastal headquarters to the Sea of Dust. Seena had been with him. They spent a night and a day in that forest, Seena terrified from the moment of landing, Gundersen comforting her in a standard manly way but finding that her terror was somehow contagious. The girl trembled as one alien happening after another presented itself, and shortly Gundersen was on the verge of trembling too. They watched, fascinated and repelled, while an army of innumerable insects with iridescent hexagonal bodies and long hairy legs strode with maniacal persistence into a sprawling glade of tigermoss; for hours the savage mouths of the carnivorous plants bit the shining insects into pieces and devoured them, and still the horde marched on to destruction. At last the moss was so glutted that it went into sporulation, puffing up cancerously and sending milky clouds of reproductive bodies spewing into the air. By morning the whole field of moss lay deflated and helpless, and tiny green reptiles with broad rasping tongues moved in to devour every strand, laying bare the soil for a new generation of flora. And then there were the feathery jelly-like things, streaked with blue and red, that hung in billowing cascades from the tallest trees, trapping unwary flying creatures. And bulky rough-skinned beasts as big as rhinos, bearing mazes of blue antlers with interlocking tines, grubbed for roots a dozen meters from their camp, glaring sourly at the strangers from Earth. And long-necked browsers with eyes like beacons munched on high leaves, squirting barrelfuls of purple urine from openings at the bases of their taut throats. And dark fat otter-like beings ran chattering past the stranded Earthmen, stealing anything within quick grasp. Other animals visited them also. This planet, which had never known the hunter’s hand, abounded in big mammals. He and Seena and the pilot had seen more grotesqueness in a day and night than they had bargained for when they signed up for outworld service.

“Have you ever been in there?” Gundersen asked Srin’gahar, as night began to conceal the rift wall.

“Never. My people seldom enter that land.”

“Occasionally, flying low over the plateau, I used to see nildoror encampments in it. Not often, but sometimes. Do you mean that your people no longer go there?”

“No,” said Srin’gahar. “A few of us have need to go to the plateau, but most do not. Sometimes the soul grows stale, and one must change one’s surroundings. If one is not ready for rebirth, one goes to the plateau. It is easier to confront one’s own soul in there, and to examine it for flaws. Can you understand what I say?”

“I think so,” Gundersen said. “It’s like a place of pilgrimage, then — a place of purification?”

“In a way.”

“But why have the nildoror never settled permanently up there? There’s plenty of food — the climate is warm—”

“It is not a place where g’rakh rules” the nildor replied.

“Is it dangerous to nildoror? Wild animals, poisonous plants, anything like that?”

“No, I would not say that. We have no fear of the plateau, and there is no place on this world that is dangerous to us. But the plateau does not interest us, except those who have the special need of which I spoke. As I say, g’rakh is foreign to it. Why should we go there? There is room enough for us in the lowlands.”

The plateau is too alien even for them, Gundersen thought. They prefer their nice little jungle. How curious!

He was not sorry when darkness hid the plateau from view.

They made camp that night beside a hissing-hot stream. Evidently its waters issued from one of the underground cauldrons that were common in this sector of the continent; Srin’gahar said that the source lay not far to the north. Clouds of steam rose from the swift flow; the water, pink with high-temperature microorganisms, bubbled and boiled. Gundersen wondered if Srin’gahar had chosen this stopping place especially for his benefit, since nildoror had no use for hot water, but Earthmen notoriously did.

He scrubbed his face, taking extraordinary pleasure in it, and supplemented a dinner of food capsules and fresh fruit with a stew of greenberry roots — delectable when boiled, poisonous otherwise. For shelter while sleeping Gundersen used a monomolecular jungle blanket that he had stowed in his backpack, his one meager article of luggage on this journey. He draped the blanket over a tripod of boughs to keep away nightflies and other noxious insects, and crawled under it. The ground, thickly grassed, was a good enough mattress for him.

The nildoror did not seem disposed toward conversation. They left him alone. All but Srin’gahar moved several hundred meters upstream for the night. Srin’gahar settled down protectively a short distance from Gundersen and wished him a good sleep.

Gundersen said, “Do you mind talking a while? I want to know something about the process of rebirth. How do you know, for instance, that your time is upon you? Is it something you feel within yourself, or is it just a matter of reaching a certain age? Do you—” He became aware that Srin’gahar was paying no attention. The nildor had fallen into what might have been a deep trance, and lay perfectly still.