In the third week of his stint at the serpent station they finally admitted him to the inner knowledge. The collection was done: the serpents had gone; a few nildoror, out of more than a dozen that had been attracted by that day's concert, still lingered outside the building. Gundersen realized that something unusual was about to happen when he saw Kurtz, after darting a sharp glance at Salamone, unhook a container of venom before it started on its route through the distilling apparatus. He poured it into a broad bowl that held at least a liter of fluid. On Earth, that much of the drug would be worth a year of Gundersen's salary as an assistant station agent. “Come with us,” Kurtz said.
The three men stepped outside. At once three nildoror approached, behaving oddly, their spines upraised, their ears trembling. They seemed skittish and eager. Kurtz handed the bowl of raw venom to Salamone, who sipped from it and handed it back. Kurtz also drank. He gave the bowl to Gundersen, saying, “Take communion with us?"
Gundersen hesitated. Salamone said, “It's safe. It can't work on your nuclei when you take it internally."
Putting the bowl to his lips, Gundersen took a cautious swig. The venom was sweet but watery.
“—only on your brain,” Salamone added.
Kurtz gently took the bowl from him and set it down on the ground. Now the largest nildor advanced and delicately dipped his trunk into it. Then the second nildor drank, and the third. The bowl now was empty.
Gundersen said, “If it's poisonous to native life—"
“Not when they drink it. Just when it's shot directly into the bloodstream,” Salamone said.
“What happens now?"
“Wait,” Kurtz said, “and make your soul receptive to any suggestions that arise."
Gundersen did not have to wait long. He felt a thickening at the base of his neck and a roughness about his face, and his arms seemed impossibly heavy. It seemed best to drop to his knees as the effect intensified. He turned toward Kurtz, seeking reassurance from those dark shining eyes, but Kurtz's eyes had already begun to flatten and expand, and his green and prehensile trunk nearly reached the ground. Salamone, too, had entered the metamorphosis, capering comically, jabbing the soil with his tusks. The thickening continued. Now Gundersen knew that he weighed several tons, and he tested his body's coordination, striding back and forth, learning how to move on four limbs. He went to the spring and sucked up water in his trunk. He rubbed his leathery hide against trees. He trumpeted bellowing sounds of joy in his hugeness. He joined with Kurtz and Salamone in a wild dance, making the ground quiver. The nildoror too were transformed; one had become Kurtz, one had become Salamone, one had become Gundersen, and the three former beasts moved in wild pirouettes, tumbling and toppling in their unfamiliarity with human ways. But Gundersen lost interest in what the nildoror were doing. He concentrated solely on his own experience. Somewhere at the core of his soul it terrified him to know that this change had come over him and he was doomed forever to live as a massive animal of the jungle, shredding bark and ripping branches; yet it was rewarding to have shifted bodies this way and to have access to an entirely new range of sensory data. His eyesight now was dimmed, and everything that he saw was engulfed in a furry halo, but there were compensations: he was able to sort odors by their directions and by their textures, and his hearing was immensely more sensitive. It was the equivalent of being able to see into the ultraviolet and the infrared. A dingy forest flower sent dizzying waves of sleek moist sweetness at him; the click of insect-claws in underground tunnels was like a symphony for percussion. And the bigness of him! The ecstasy of carrying such a body! His transformed consciousness soared, swooped, rose high again. He trampled trees and praised himself for it in booming tones. He grazed and gorged. Then he sat for a while, perfectly still, and meditated on the existence of evil in the universe, asking himself why there should be such a thing, and indeed whether evil in fact existed as an objective phenomenon. His answers surprised and delighted him, and he turned to Kurtz to communicate his insights, but just then the effect of the venom began to fade with quite startling suddenness, and in a short while Gundersen felt altogether normal again. He was weeping, though, and he felt an anguish of shame, as though he had been flagrantly detected molesting a child. The three nildoror were nowhere in sight. Salamone picked up the bowl and went into the station. “Come,” Kurtz said. “Let's go in too."
They would not discuss any of it with him. They had let him share in it, but they would not explain a thing, cutting him off sternly when he asked. The rite was hermetically private. Gundersen was wholly unable to evaluate the experience. Had his body actually turned into that of a nildor for an hour? Hardly. Well, then, had his mind, his soul, somehow migrated into the nildor's body? And had the nildor's soul, if nildoror had souls, gone into his? What kind of sharing, what sort of union of innernesses, had occurred in that clearing?
Three days afterward, Gundersen applied for a transfer out of the serpent station. In those days he was easily upset by the unknown. Kurtz's only reaction, when Gundersen announced he was leaving, was a short brutal chuckle. The normal tour of duty at the station was eight weeks, of which Gundersen had done less than half. He never again served a stint there.
Later, he gathered what gossip he could about the doings at the serpent station. He was told vague tales of sexual abominations in the grove, of couplings between Earthman and nildor, between Earthman and Earthman; he heard murmurs that those who habitually drank the venom underwent strange and terrible permanent changes of the body; he heard stories of how the nildoror elders in their private councils bitterly condemned the morbid practice of going to the serpent station to drink the stuff the Earthmen offered. But Gundersen did not know if any of these whispers were true. He found it difficult, in later years, to look Kurtz in the eye on the rare occasions when they met. Sometimes he found it difficult even to live with himself. In some peripheral way he had been tainted by his single hour of metamorphosis. He felt like a virgin who had stumbled into an orgy, and who had come away deflowered but yet ignorant of what had befallen her.
The phantoms faded. The sound of Kurtz's guitar diminished and was gone.
Srin'gahar said, “Shall we leave now?"
Gundersen slowly emerged from the ruined station. “Does anyone gather the juices of the serpents today?"
“Not here,” said the nildor. He knelt. The Earthman mounted him, and in silence Srin'gahar carried him away, back to the path they had followed earlier.
Four
IN EARLY AFTERNOON they neared the nildoror encampment that was Gundersen's immediate goal. For most of the day they had been traveling across the broad coastal plain, but now the back of the land dipped sharply, for this far inland there was a long, narrow depression running from north to south, a deep rift between the central plateau and the coast. At the approach to this rift Gundersen saw the immense devastation of foliage that signaled the presence of a large nildoror herd within a few kilometers. A jagged scar ran through the forest from ground level to a point about twice a man's height.
Even the lunatic tropical fertility of this region could not keep up with the nildoror appetite; it took a year or more for such zones of defoliation to restore themselves after the herd had moved on. Yet despite the impact of the herd, the forest on all sides of the scar was even more close-knit here than on the coastal plain to the east. This was a jungle raised to the next higher power, damp, steamy, dark. The temperature was considerably higher in the valley than at the coast, and though the atmosphere could not possibly have been any more humid here, there was an almost tangible wetness about the air. The vegetation was different, too. On the plain the trees tended to have sharp, sometimes dangerously sharp, leaves. Here the foliage was rounded and fleshy, heavy sagging disks of dark blue that glistened voluptuously whenever stray shafts of sunlight pierced the forest canopy overhead.
Gundersen and his mount continued to descend, following the line of the grazing scar. Now they made their way along the route of a stre
am that flowed perversely inland; the soil was spongy and soft, and more often than not Srin'gahar walked knee-deep in mud. They were entering a wide circular basin at what seemed to be the lowest point in the entire region. Streams flowed into it on three or four sides, feeding a dark weed-covered lake at the center; and around the margin of the lake was Srin'gahar's herd. Gundersen saw several hundred nildoror grazing, sleeping, coupling, strolling.
“Put me down,” he said, taking himself by surprise. “I'll walk beside you."
Wordlessly Srin'gahar allowed him to dismount.
Gundersen regretted his egalitarian impulse the moment he stepped down. The nildor's broad-padded feet were able to cope with the muddy floor; but Gundersen discovered that he had a tendency to begin to sink in if he remained in one place more than a moment. But he would not remount now. Every step was a struggle, but he struggled. He was tense and uncertain, too, of the reception he would get here, and he was hungry as well, having eaten nothing on the long journey but a few bitterfruits plucked from passing trees. The closeness of the climate made each breath a battle for him. He was greatly relieved when the footing became easier a short distance down the slope. Here, a webwork of spongy plants spreading out from the lake underwove the mud to form a firm, if not altogether reassuring, platform a few centimeters down.
Srin'gahar raised his trunk and sounded a trumpetblast of greeting to the encampment. A few of the nildoror replied in kind. To Gundersen, Srin'gahar said, “The many-born one stands at the edge of the lake, friend of my journey. You see him, yes, in that group? Shall I lead you now to him?"
“Please,” said Gundersen.
The lake was congested with drifting vegetation. Humped masses of it broke the surface everywhere: leaves like horns of plenty, cup-shaped spore-bodies, ropy tangled stems, everything dark blue against the lighter blue-green of the water. Through this maze of tight-packed flora there slowly moved huge semiaquatic mammals, half a dozen malidaror, whose tubular yellowish bodies were almost totally submerged. Only the rounded bulges of their backs and the jutting periscopes of their stalked eyes were in view, and now and then a pair of cavernous snorting nostrils. Gundersen could see the immense swaths that the malidaror had cut through the vegetation in this day's feeding, but at the far side of the lake the wounds were beginning to close as new growth hastened to fill the fresh gaps.
Gundersen and Srin'gahar went down toward the water. Suddenly the wind shifted, and Gundersen had a whiff of the lake's fragrance. He coughed; it was like breathing the fumes of a distillery vat. The lake was in ferment. Alcohol was a by-product of the respiration of these water-plants, and, having no outlet, the lake became one large tub of brandy. Both water and alcohol evaporated from it at a rapid pace, making the surrounding air not only steamy but potent; and during centuries when evaporation of water had exceeded the inflow from the streams, the proof of the residue had steadily risen. When the Company ruled this planet, such lakes had been the undoing of more than one agent, Gundersen knew.
The nildoror appeared to pay little heed to him as he came near them. Gundersen was aware that every member of the encampment was actually watching him closely, but they pretended to casualness and went about their business. He was puzzled to see a dozen brush shelters flanking one of the streams. Nildoror did not live in dwellings of any sort; the climate made it unnecessary, and besides they were incapable of constructing anything, having no organs of manipulation other than the three “fingers” at the tips of their trunks. He studied the crude lean-tos in bewilderment, and after a moment it dawned on him that he had seen structures of this sort before: they were the huts of sulidoror. The puzzle deepened. Such close association between the nildoror and the carnivorous bipeds of the mist country was unknown to him. Now he saw the sulidoror themselves, perhaps twenty of them, sitting crosslegged inside their huts. Slaves? Captives? Friends of the tribe? None of those ideas made sense.
“That is our many-born,” Srin'gahar said, indicating with a wave of his trunk a seamed and venerable nildor in the midst of a group by the lakeshore.
Gundersen felt a surge of awe, inspired not only by the great age of the creature, but by the knowledge that this ancient beast, blue-gray with years, must have taken part several times in the unimaginable rites of the rebirth ceremony. The many-born one had journeyed beyond the barrier of spirit that held Earthmen back. Whatever nirvana the rebirth ceremony offered, this being had tasted it, and Gundersen had not, and that crucial distinction of experience made Gundersen's courage shrivel as he approached the leader of the herd.
A ring of courtiers surrounded the old one. They were gray-skinned and wrinkled, too: a congregation of seniors. Younger nildoror, of the generation of Srin'gahar, kept a respectful distance. There were no immature nildoror in the encampment at all. No Earthman had ever seen a young nildor. Gundersen had been told that the nildoror were always born in the mist country, in the home country of the sulidoror, and apparently they remained in close seclusion there until they had reached the nildoror equivalent of adolescence, when they migrated to the jungles of the tropics. He also had heard that every nildor hoped to go back to the mist country when its time had come to die. But he did not know if such things were true. No one did.
The ring opened, and Gundersen found himself facing the many-born one. Protocol demanded that Gundersen speak first; but he faltered, dizzied by tension perhaps, or perhaps by the fumes of the lake, and it was an endless moment before he pulled himself together.
He said at last, “I am Edmund Gundersen of the first birth, and I wish you joy of many rebirths, O wisest one."
Unhurriedly the nildor swung his vast head to one side, sucked up a snort of water from the lake, and squirted it into his mouth. Then he rumbled, “You are known to us, Edmundgundersen, from days past. You kept the big house of the Company at Fire Point in the Sea of Dust."
The nildor's sharpness of memory astonished and distressed him. If they remembered him so well, what chance did he have to win favors from these people? They owed him no kindnesses.
“I was there, yes, a long time ago,” he said tightly.
“Not so long ago. Ten turnings is not a long time.” The nildor's heavy-lidded eyes closed, and it appeared for some moments as though the many-born one had fallen asleep. Then the nildor said, eyes still closed, “I am Vol'himyor of the seventh birth. Will you come into the water with me? I grow tired easily on the land in this present birth of mine."
Without waiting, Vol'himyor strode into the lake, swimming slowly to a point some forty meters from shore and floating there, submerged up to the shoulders. A malidar that had been browsing on the weeds in that part of the lake went under with a bubbling murmur of discontent and reappeared far away. Gundersen knew that he had no choice but to follow the many-born one. He stripped off his clothing and walked forward.
The tepid water rose about him. Not far out, the spongy matting of fibrous stems below ground level gave way to soft warm mud beneath Gundersen's bare feet. He felt the occasional movement of small many-legged things under his soles. The roots of the water-plants swirled whip-like about his legs, and the black bubbles of alcohol that came up from the depths and burst on the surface almost stifled him with their release of vapor. He pushed plants aside, forcing his way through them with the greatest difficulty, and feeling a great relief when his feet lost contact with the mud. Quickly he paddled himself out to Vol'himyor. The surface of the water was clear there, thanks to the malidar. In the dark depths of the lake, though, unknown creatures moved to and fro, and every few moments something slippery and quick slithered along Gundersen's body. He forced himself to ignore such things.
Vol'himyor, still seemingly asleep, murmured, “You have been gone from this world for many turnings, have you not?"
“After the Company relinquished its rights here, I returned to my own world,” said Gundersen.
Even before the nildor's eyelids parted, even before the round yellow eyes fixed coldly on him, Gundersen was aware that
he had blundered.
“Your Company never had rights here to relinquish,” said the nildor in the customary flat, neutral way. “Is this not so?"
“It is so,” Gundersen conceded. He searched for a graceful correction and finally said, “After the Company relinquished possession of this planet, I returned to my own world."
“Those words are more nearly true. Why, then, have you come back here?"
“Because I love this place and wish to see it again."
“Is it possible for an Earthman to feel love for Belzagor?"
“An Earthman can, yes."
“An Earthman can become captured by Belzagor,” Vol'himyor said with more than usual slowness. “An Earthman may find that his soul has been seized by the forces of this planet and is held in thrall. But I doubt that an Earthman can feel love for this planet, as I understand your understanding of love."
“I yield the point, many-born one. My soul has become captured by Belzagor. I could not help but return."
“You are quick to yield such points."
“I have no wish to give offense."
“Commendable tact. And what will you do here on this world that has seized your soul?"
“Travel to many parts of your world,” said Gundersen. “I wish particularly to go to the mist country."
“Why there?"
“It is the place that captures me most deeply."
“That is not an informative answer,” the nildor said.
“I can give no other."
“What thing has captured you there?"
“The beauty of the mountains rising out of the mist. The sparkle of sunlight on a clear, cold, bright day. The splendor of the moons against a field of glittering snow."
“You are quite poetic,” said Vol'himyor.
Gundersen could not tell if he were being praised or mocked.