Robert Silverberg - Downward to the Earth

Shrugging, Gundersen rolled over and waited for sleep, but sleep was a long time coming.

He thought a good deal about the terms under which he had been permitted to make this northward journey. Perhaps another many-born one would have allowed him to go into the mist country without attaching the condition that he bring back Cedric Cullen; perhaps he would not have been granted safe-conduct at all. Gundersen suspected that the results would have been the same no matter which encampment of nildoror he had happened to go to for his travel permission. Though the nildoror had no means of long-distance communication, no governmental structure in an Earthly sense, no more coherence as a race than a population of jungle beasts, they nevertheless were remarkably well able to keep in touch with one another and to strike common policies.

What was it that Cullen had done, Gundersen wondered, to make him so eagerly sought?

In the olden days Cullen had seemed overwhelmingly normal: a cheerful, amiable ruddy man who collected insects, spoke no harsh words, and held his liquor well. When Gundersen had been the chief agent out at Fire Point, in the Sea of Dust, a dozen years before, Cullen had been his assistant. Months on end there were only the two of them in the place, and Gundersen had come to know him quite well, he imagined. Cullen had no plans for making a career with the Company; he said he had signed a six-year contract, would not renew, and intended to take up a university appointment when he had done his time on Holman’s World. He was here only for seasoning, and for the prestige that accrues to anyone who has a record of outworld service. But then the political situation of Earth grew complex, and the Company was forced to agree to relinquish a great many planets that it had colonized. Gundersen, like most of the fifteen thousand Company people here, had accepted a transfer to another assignment. Cullen, to Gundersen’s amazement, was among the handful who opted to stay, even though that meant severing his ties with the home world. Gundersen had not asked him why; one did not discuss such things. But it seemed odd.

He saw Cullen clearly in memory, chasing bugs through the Sea of Dust, killing bottle jouncing against his hip as he ran from one rock outcropping to the next — an overgrown boy, really. The beauty of the Sea of Dust was altogether lost on him. No sector of the planet was more truly alien, nor more spectacular: a dry ocean bed, greater in size than the Atlantic, coated with a thick layer of fine crystalline mineral fragments as bright as mirrors when the sun was on them. From the station at Fire Point one could see the morning light advancing out of the east like a river of flame, spilling forth until the whole desert blazed. The crystals swallowed energy all day, and gave it forth all night, so that even at twilight the eerie radiance rose brightly, and after dark a throbbing purplish glow lingered for hours. In this almost lifeless but wondrously beautiful desert the Company had mined a dozen precious metals and thirty precious and semiprecious stones. The mining machines set forth from the station on far-ranging rounds, grinding up loveliness and returning with treasure; there was not much for an agent to do there except keep inventory of the mounting wealth and play host to the tourist parties that came to see the splendor of the countryside. Gundersen had grown terribly bored, and even the glories of the scenery had become tiresome to him; but Cullen, to whom the incandescent desert was merely a flashy nuisance, fell back on his hobby for entertainment, and filled bottle after bottle with his insects. Were the mining machines still standing in the Sea of Dust, Gundersen wondered, waiting for the command to resume operations? If the Company had not taken them away after relinquishment, they would surely stand there throughout all eternity, unrusting, useless, amidst the hideous gouges they had cut. The machines had scooped down through the crystalline layer to the dull basalt below, and had spewed out vast heaps of tailings and debris as they gnawed for wealth. Probably the Company had left the things behind, too, as monuments to commerce. Machinery was cheap, interstellar transport was costly; why bother removing them? “In another thousand years,” Gundersen once had said, “the Sea of Dust will all be destroyed and there’ll be nothing but rubble here, if these machines continue to chew up the rock at the present rate.” Cullen had shrugged and smiled. “Well, one won’t need to wear these dark glasses, then, once the infernal glare is gone,” he had said. “Eh?” And now the rape of the desert was over and the machines were still; and now Cullen was a fugitive in the mist country, wanted for some crime so terrible the nildoror would not even give it a name.

/

WHEN THEY TOOK to the road in the morning it was Srin’gahar, uncharacteristically, who opened the conversation.

“Tell me of elephants, friend of my journey. What do they look like, and how do they live?”

“Where did you hear of elephants?”

“The Earthpeople at the hotel spoke of them. And also in the past, I have heard the word said. They are beings of Earth that look like nildoror, are they not?”

“There is a certain resemblance,” Gundersen conceded.

“A close one?”

“There are many similarities.” He wished Srin’gahar were able to comprehend a sketch. “They are long and high in the body, like you, and they have four legs, and tails, and trunks. They have tusks, but only two, one here, one here. Their eyes are smaller and placed in a poor position, here, here. And here—” He indicated Srin’gahar’s skullcrest. “Here they have nothing. Also their bones do not move as your bones do.”

“It sounds to me,” said Srin’gahar, “as though these elephants look very much like nildoror.”

“I suppose they do.”

“Why is this, can you say? Do you believe that we and the elephants can be of the same race?”

“It isn’t possible,” said Gundersen. “It’s simply a — a—” He groped for words; the nildororu vocabulary did not include the technical terms of genetics. “Simply a pattern in the development of life that occurs on many worlds. Certain basic designs of living creatures recur everywhere. The elephant design — the nildoror design — is one of them. The large body, the huge head, the short neck, the long trunk enabling the being to pick up objects and handle them without having to bend — these things will develop wherever the proper conditions are found.”

“You have seen elephants, then, on many other worlds?”

“On some,” Gundersen said. “Following the same general pattern of construction, or at least some aspects of it, although the closest resemblance of all is between elephants and nildoror. I could tell you of half a dozen other creatures that seem to belong to the same group. And this is also true of many other life-forms — insects, reptiles, small mammals, and so on. There are certain niches to be filled on every world. The thoughts of the Shaping Force travel the same path everywhere.”

“Where, then, are Belzagor’s equivalents of men?”

Gundersen faltered. “I didn’t say that there were exact equivalents everywhere. The closest thing to the human pattern on your planet, I guess, is the sulidoror. And they aren’t very close.”

“On Earth, the men rule. Here the sulidoror are the secondary race.”

“An accident of development. Your g’rakh is superior to that of the sulidoror; on our world we have no other species that possesses g’rakh at all. But the physical resemblances between men and sulidoror are many. They walk on two legs; so do we. They eat both flesh and fruit; so do we. They have hands which can grasp things; so do we. Their eyes are in front of their heads; so are ours. I know, they’re bigger, stronger, hairier, and less intelligent than human beings, but I’m trying to show you how patterns can be similar on different planets, even though there’s no real blood relationship between—”