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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 i
“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 di
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.
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.