Downward to the Earth

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked.

  “What you're wearing makes me nervous."

  “The slider?"

  “If that's what it's called."

  “It's what the sulidoror call it,” Seena said. “It comes from the central plateau. It clings to one of the big mammals there and lives by metabolizing perspiration. Isn't it splendid?"

  “I thought you hated the plateau."

  “Oh, that was a long time ago. I've been there many times. I brought the slider back on the last trip. It's as much of a pet as it is something to wear. Look.” She touched it lightly and it went through a series of color changes, expanding as it approached the blue end of the spectrum, contracting toward the red. At its greatest extension it formed a complete tunic covering Seena from throat to thighs. Gundersen became aware of something dark and pulsing at the heart of it, resting just above her loins, hiding the pubic triangle: its nerve-center, perhaps. “Why do you dislike it?” she asked. “Here. Put your hand on it.” He made no move. She took his hand in hers and touched it to her side; he felt the slider's cool dry surface and was surprised that it was not slimy. Easily Seena moved his hand upward until it came to the heavy globe of a breast, and instantly the slider contracted, leaving the firm warm flesh bare to his fingers. He cupped it in a moment, and, uneasy, withdrew his hand. Her nipples had hardened; her nostrils had flared.

  He said, “The slider's very interesting. But I don't like it on you."

  “Very well.” She touched herself at the base of her belly, just above the organism's core. It shrank inward and flowed down her leg in one swift rippling movement gliding away and collecting itself at the far side of the veranda. “Is that better?” Seena asked, naked, now, sweat-shiny, moistlipped.

  The coarseness of her approach startled him. Neither he nor she had ever worried much about nudity, but there was a deliberate sexual aggressiveness about this kind of self-display that seemed out of keeping with what he regarded as her character. They were old friends, yes; they had once been lovers for several years; they had been married in all but the name for many months of that time; but even so the ambiguity of their parting should have destroyed whatever intimacy once existed. And, leaving the question of her marriage to Kurtz out of it, the fact that they had not seen one another for eight years seemed to him to dictate the necessity of a more gradual return to physical closeness. He felt that by making herself pantingly available to him within minutes of his unexpected arrival she was committing a breach not of morals but of esthetics.

  “Put something on,” he said quietly. “And not the slider. I can't have a serious conversation with you while you're waving all those jiggling temptations in my face."

  “Poor conventional Edmund. All right. Have you had dinner?"

  “No."

  “I'll have it served out here. And drinks. I'll be right back."

  She entered the building. The slider remained behind on the veranda; it rolled tentatively toward Gundersen, as though offering to climb up and be worn by him for a while, but he glared at it and enough feeling got through to make the plateau creature move hurriedly away. A minute later a robot emerged, bearing a tray on which two golden cocktails sat. It offered one drink to Gundersen, set the other on the railing, and noiselessly departed. Then Seena returned, chastely clad in a soft gray shift that descended from her shoulders to her shins.

  “Better?” she asked.

  “For now.” They touched glasses; she smiled; they put their drinks to their lips. “You remembered that I don't like sonic snouts,” he said.

  “I forget very little, Edmund."

  “What's it like, living up here?"

  “Serene. I never imagined that my life could be so calm. I read a good deal; I help the robots tend the garden; occasionally there are guests; sometimes I travel. Weeks often go by without my seeing another human being."

  “What about your husband?"

  “Weeks often go by without my seeing another human being,” she said.

  “You're alone here? You and the robots?"

  “Quite alone."

  “But the other Company people must come here fairly frequently."

  “Some do. There aren't many of us left now,” Seena said. “Less than a hundred, I imagine. About six at the Sea of Dust. Van Beneker down by the hotel. Four or five at the old rift station. And so on—little islands of Earthmen widely scattered. There's a sort of a social circuit, but it's a sparse one."

  “Is this what you wanted when you chose to stay here?” Gundersen asked.

  “I didn't know what I wanted, except that I wanted to stay. But I'd do it again. Knowing everything I know, I'd do it just the same way."

  He said, “At the station just south of here, below the falls, I saw Harold Dykstra—"

  “Henry Dykstra."

  “Henry. And a woman I didn't know."

  “Pauleen Mazor. She was one of the customs girls, in the time of the Company. Henry and Pauleen are my closest neighbors, I guess. But I haven't seen them in years. I never go south of the falls any more, and they haven't come here."

  “They're dead, Seena."

  “Oh?"

  “It was like stepping into a nightmare. A sulidor led me to them. The station was a wreck, mold and fungoids everywhere, and something was hatching inside them, the larvae of some kind of basket-shaped red sponge that hung on a wall and dripped black oil—"

  “Things like that happen,” Seena said, not sounding disturbed. “Sooner or later this planet catches everyone, though always in a different way."

  “Dykstra was unconscious, and the woman was begging to be put out of her misery, and—"

  “You said they were dead."

  “Not when I got there. I told the sulidor to kill them. There was no hope of saving them. He split them open, and then I used my torch on them."

  “We had to do that for Gio’ Salamone, too,” Seena said. “He was staying at Fire Point, and went out into the Sea of Dust and got some kind of crystalline parasite into a cut. When Kurtz and Ced Cullen found him, he was all cubes and prisms, outcroppings of the most beautiful iridescent minerals breaking through his skin everywhere. And he was still alive. For a while. Another drink?"

  “Please. Yes."

  She summoned the robot. It was quite dark, now. A third moon had appeared.

  In a low voice Seena said, “I'm so happy you came tonight, Edmund. It was such a wonderful surprise."

  “Kurtz isn't here now?"

  “No,” she said. “He's away, and I don't know when he'll be back."

  “How has it been for him, living here?"

  “I think he's been quite happy, generally speaking. Of course, he's a very strange man."

  “He is,” Gundersen said.

  “He's got a quality of sainthood about him, I think."

  “He would have been a dark and chilling saint, Seena."

  “Some saints are. They don't all have to be St. Francis of Assisi."

  “Is cruelty one of the desirable traits of a saint?"

  “Kurtz saw cruelty as a dynamic force. He made himself an artist of cruelty."

  “So did the Marquis de Sade. Nobody's canonized him."

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “You once spoke of Kurtz to me, and you called him a fallen angel. That's exactly right. I saw him out among the nildoror, dancing with hundreds of them, and they came to him and practically worshipped him. There he was, talking to them, caressing them. And yet also doing the most destructive things to them as well, but they loved it."

  “What kind of destructive things?"

  “They don't matter. I doubt that you'd approve. He—gave them drugs, sometimes."

  “The serpent venom?"

  “Sometimes."

  “Where is he now? Out playing with the nildoror?"

  “He's been ill for a while.” The robot now was serving dinner. Gundersen frowned at the strange vegetables on his plate. “They're perfectly safe,” Seena said “I grow them myself,
in back. I'm quite the farmer."

  “I don't remember any of these."

  “They're from the plateau."

  Gundersen shook his head. “When I think of how disgusted you were by the plateau, how strange and frightening it seemed to you that time we had to crash-land there—"

  “I was a child then. When was it, eleven years ago? Soon after I met you. I was only twenty years old. But on Belzagor you must defeat what frightens you, or you will be defeated. I went back to the plateau. Again and again. It ceased to be strange to me, and so it ceased to frighten me, and so I came to love it. And brought many of its plants and animals back here to live with me. It's so very different from the rest of Belzagor—cut off from everything else, almost alien."

  “You went there with Kurtz?"

  “Sometimes. And sometimes with Ced Cullen. And most often alone."

  “Cullen,” Gundersen said. “Do you see him often?"

  “Oh, yes. He and Kurtz and I have been a kind of triumvirate. My other husband, almost. I mean, in a spiritual way. Physical too, at times, but that's not as important"

  “Where is Cullen now?” he asked, looking intently into her harsh and glossy eyes.

  Her expression darkened. “In the north. The mist country."

  “What's he doing there?"

  “Why don't you go ask him?” she suggested.

  “I'd like to do just that,” Gundersen said. “I'm on my way up mist country, actually, and this is just a sentimental stop on the way. I'm traveling with five nildoror going for rebirth. They're camped in the bush out there somewhere."

  She opened a flask of a musky gray-green wine and gave him some. “Why do you want to go to the mist country?” she asked tautly.

  “Curiosity. The same motive that sent Cullen up there, I guess."

  “I don't think his motive was curiosity."

  “Will you amplify that?"

  “I'd rather not,” she said.

  The conversation sputtered into silence. Talking to her led only in circles, he thought. This new serenity of hers could be maddening. She told him only what she cared to tell him, playing with him, seemingly relishing the touch of her sweet contralto voice on the night air, communicating no information at all. This was not a Seena he had ever known. The girl he had loved had been resilient and strong, but not crafty or secretive; there had been an innocence about her that seemed totally lost now. Kurtz might not be the only fallen angel on this planet.

  He said suddenly, “The fourth moon has risen!"

  “Yes. Of course. Is that so amazing?"

  “One rarely sees four, even in this latitude."

  “It happens at least ten times a year. Why waste your awe? In a little while the fifth one will be up, and—"

  Gundersen gasped. “Is that what tonight is?"

  “The Night of Five Moons, yes."

  “No one told me!"

  “Perhaps you never asked."

  “Twice I missed it because I was at Fire Point. One year I was at sea, and once I was in the southern mist country, the time that the copter went down. And so on and on. I managed to see it only once, Seena, right here, ten years ago, with you. When things were at their best for us. And now, to come in by accident and have it happen!"

  “I thought you had arranged to be here deliberately. To commemorate that other time."

  “No. No. Pure coincidence."

  “Happy coincidence, then."

  “When does it rise?"

  “Perhaps an hour."

  He watched the four bright dots swimming through the sky. It was so long ago that he had forgotten where the fifth moon should be coming from. Its orbit was retrograde, he thought. It was the most brilliant of the moons, too, with a high-albedo surface of ice, smooth as a mirror.

  Seena filled his glass again. They had finished eating. “Excuse me,” she said. “I'll be back soon."

  Alone, he studied the sky and tried to comprehend this strangely altered Seena, this mysterious woman whose body had grown more voluptuous and whose soul, it seemed, had turned to stone. He saw now that the stone had been in her all along: at their breakup, for example, when he had put in for her transfer to Earth, and she had absolutely refused to leave Holman's World. I love you, she had said, and I'll always love you, but this is where I stay. Why? Why? Because I want to stay, she told him. And she stayed; and he was just as stubborn, and left without her; and they slept together on the beach beneath the hotel on his last night, so that the warmth of her body was still on his skin when he boarded the ship that took him away. She loved him and he loved her, but they broke apart, for he saw no future on this world, and she saw all her future on it. And she had married Kurtz. And she had explored the unknown plateau. And she spoke in a rich deep new voice, and let alien amoebas clasp her loins, and shrugged at the news that two nearby Earthmen had died a horrible death. Was she still Seena, or some subtle counterfeit?

  Nildoror sounds drifted out of the darkness. Gundersen heard another sound, too, closer by, a kind of stifled snorting grunt that was wholly unfamiliar to him. It seemed like a cry of pain, though perhaps that was his imagination. Probably it was one of Seena's plateau beasts, snuffling around searching for tasty roots in the garden. He heard it twice more, and then not again.

  Time went by and Seena did not return.

  Then he saw the fifth moon float placidly into the sky, the size of a large silver coin, and so bright that it dazzled the eye. About it the other four danced, two of them mere tiny dots, two of them more imposing, and the shadows of the moonslight shattered and shattered again as planes of brilliance intersected. The heavens poured light upon the land in icy cascades. He gripped the rail of the veranda and silently begged the moons to hold their pattern; like Faust he longed to cry out to the fleeting moment, stay, stay forever, stay, you are beautiful! But the moons shifted, driven by the unseen Newtonian machinery; he knew that in another hour two of them would be gone and the magic would ebb. Where was Seena?

  “Edmund?” she said, from behind him.

  She was bare, again, and once more the slider was on her body, covering her loins, sending a long thin projection up to encompass only the nipple of each ripe breast. The light of the five moons made her tawny skin glitter and shine. Now she did not seem coarse to him, nor overly aggressive; she was perfect in her nudity, and the moment was perfect, and unhesitatingly he went to her. Quickly he dropped his clothing. He put his hands to her hips, touching the slider, and the strange creature understood, flowing obediently from her body, a chastity belt faithless to its task. She leaned toward him, her breasts swaying like fleshy bells, and he kissed her, here, here, here, there, and they sank to the veranda floor, to the cold smooth stone.

  Her eyes remained open, and colder than the floor, colder than the shifting light of the moons, even at the moment when he entered her.

  But there was nothing cold about her embrace. Their bodies thrashed and tangled, and her skin was soft and her kiss was hungry, and the years rolled away until it was the old time again, the happy time. At the highest moment he was dimly aware of that strange grunting sound once more. He clasped her fiercely and let his eyes close.

  Afterward they lay side by side, wordless in the moonslight, until the brilliant fifth moon had completed its voyage across the sky and the Night of the Five Moons had become as any other night.

  Ten

  HE SLEPT BY himself in one of the guest rooms on the topmost level of the station. Awakening unexpectedly early, he watched the sunrise coming over the gorge, and went down to walk through the gardens, which still were glistening with dew. He strolled as far as the edge of the river, looking for his nildoror companions; but they were not to be seen. For a long time he stood beside the river watching the irresistible downward sweep of that immense volume of water. Were there fish in the river here, he wondered? How did they avoid being carried over the brink? Surely anything once caught up in that mighty flow would have no choice but to follow the route dictated for it, and be swept
toward the terrible drop.

  He went back finally to the station. By the light of morning Seena's garden seemed less sinister to him. Even the plants and animals of the plateau appeared merely strange, not menacing; each geographical district of this world had its own typical fauna and flora, that was all, and it was not the fault of the plateau's creatures that man had not chosen to make himself at ease among them. A robot met him on the first veranda and offered him breakfast.

  “I'll wait for the woman,” Gundersen said.

  “She will not appear until much later in the morning."

  “That's odd. She never used to sleep that much."

  “She is with the man,” the robot volunteered. “She stays with him and comforts him at this hour."

  “What man?"

  “The man Kurtz, her husband."

  Gundersen said, amazed, “Kurtz is here at the station?"

  “He lies ill in his room."

  She said he was away somewhere, Gundersen thought. She didn't know when he'd be coming back.

  Gundersen said, “Was he in his room last night?"

  “He was."

  “How long has he been back from his last journey away from here?"

  “One year at the solstice,” the robot said. “Perhaps you should consult the woman on these matters. She will be with you after a while. Shall I bring breakfast?"

  “Yes,” Gundersen said.

  But Seena was not long in arriving. Ten minutes after he had finished the juices, fruits, and fried fish that the robot had brought him, she appeared on the veranda, wearing a filmy white wrap through which the contours of her body were evident. She seemed to have slept well. Her skin was clear and glowing, her stride was vigorous, her dark hair streamed buoyantly in the morning breeze; but yet the curiously rigid and haunted expression of her eyes was unchanged, and clashed with the innocence of the new day.

  He said, “The robot told me not to wait breakfast for you. It said you wouldn't be down for a long while."

  “That's all right. I'm not usually down this early, it's true. Come for a swim?"

  “In the river?"

  “No, silly!” She stripped away her wrap and ran down the steps into the garden. He sat frozen a moment, caught up in the rhythms of her swinging arms, her jouncing buttocks; then he followed her. At a twist in the path that he had not noticed before, she turned to the left and halted at a circular pool that appeared to have been punched out of the living rock on the river's flank. As he reached it, she launched herself in a fine arching dive, and appeared to hang suspended a moment, floating above the dark water, her breasts drawn into a startling roundness by gravity's pull. Then she went under. Before she came up for breath, Gundersen was naked and in the pool beside her. Even in this mild climate the water was bitterly cold.