Collected Short Fiction, page 754
He comprehended now what had happened to Kurtz in this mountain.
Gundersen stumbled into a cell in which a creature lay midway in its metamorphosis. Smaller than a nildor, larger than a sulidor; fangs, not tusks; trunk, not snout; fur, not hide; flat footpads, not claws; body shaped for walking upright.
“Who are you?” Gundersen whispered. “What are you? What were you? Which way are you heading?”
Rebirth. Cycle upon cycle upon cycle. Nildoror bound upon a northward pilgrimage, entering these caves, becoming—sulidoror?
If this is true, Gundersen thought, then we have never really known anything about this planet. And this is true.
He ran wildly from cell to cell, no longer caring whether he might be discovered. Each cell confirmed his guess. He saw nildoror and sulidoror in every stage of metamorphosis, some almost wholly nildoror, some unmistakably sulidoror, but most of them occupying intermediate positions along that journey from pole to pole; more than half were so deep in transformation that it was impossible for him to tell which way they were heading. All slept. Before his eyes flesh flowed but nothing moved. In these cool shadowy chambers change came as a dream.
Gundersen reached the end of the corridor. He pressed his palms against cold, unyielding stone. Breathless, sweat-drenched, he turned toward the last chamber in the series and plunged into it.
WITHIN was a sulidor not yet asleep, standing over three of the sluggish serpents of the tropics, which moved in gentle coils about him. The sulidor was huge, age-grizzled, a being of unusual presence and dignity.
“Na-sinisul?” Gundersen asked. “We knew that in time you must come here, Edmund Gundersen.”
“I never imagined—I didn’t understand—” Gundersen paused, struggling to regain control. More quietly he said, “Forgive me if I have intruded. Have I interrupted your rebirth’s beginning?”
“I have several days yet,” the sulidor said. “I merely prepare the chamber now.”
“And you’ll come forth from it as a nildor.”
“Yes,” said Na-sinisul.
“Life goes in a cycle here, then?
Sulidor to nildor to sulidor to nildor to—”
“Yes. Over and over, rebirth after rebirth.”
“All nildoror spend part of their lives as sulidoror? All sulidoror spend part of there lives as nildoror?”
“Yes. All.”
How had it begun, Gundersen wondered? How had the destinies of these two so different races become entangled? How had an entire species consented to undergo such a metamorphosis? He knew now why he had never seen an infant nildor or sulidor. He said, “Are young ones of either race ever born on this world?”
“Only when needed as replacements for those who can be reborn no more. It is not often. Our population is stable.”
“Stable, yet constantly changing.”
“Through a predictable pattern of change,” said Na-sinisul. “When I emerge I will be Fi’gontor of the ninth birth. My people have waited for thirty turnings for me to rejoin them but circumstances required me to remain this long in the forests of the mists.”
“Is nine rebirths unusual?”
“There are those among us who have been here fifteen times. There are some who wait a hundred turnings to be called once. The summons comes when the summons comes—and for those who merit it, life will have no end.”
“No—end—”
“Why should it?” Na-sinisul asked. “In this mountain we are purged of the poisons of age and elsewhere we purge ourselves of the poisons of sin.”
“On the central plateau, that is.”
“I see you have spoken with the man Cullen.”
“Yes,” Gundersen said. “Just before his—death.”
“I knew also that his life was over,” said Na-sinisul. “We learn things swiftly here.”
Gundersen said, “Where are Srin’gahar and Luu’khamin and the others I traveled with?”
“They are here, in cells not far away.”
“Already in rebirth?”
“For some days now. They will be sulidoror soon and will live in the north until they are summoned to assume the nildor form again. Thus we refresh our souls by undertaking new lives.”
“During the sulidor phase—do you keep a memory of your past life as a nildor?”
“Certainly. How can experience be valuable if it is not retained? We accumulate wisdom. Our grasp of truth is heightened by seeing the universe now through a nildor’s eyes, not through a sulidor’s. Not in body alone are the two forms different. To undergo rebirth is to enter a new world, not merely a new life.”
Hesitantly Gundersen said, “And when someone who is not of this planet undergoes rebirth? What effect is there? What kind of changes happen?”
“You saw Kurtz.”
“I saw Kurtz,” said Gundersen. “But I have no idea what Kurtz has become.”
“Kurtz has become Kurtz,” the sulidor said. “For your kind there can be no true transformation, because you have no complementary species. You change, yes, but you become only what you have the potential to become. You liberate such forces as already exist within you. While he slept, Kurtz chose his new form himself. No one else designed it for him. It is not easy to explain this with words, Edmund Gundersen.”
“If I underwent rebirth, then, I wouldn’t necessarily turn into something like Kurtz?”
“Not unless your soul is as Kurtz’ soul and that is not possible.”
“What would I become?”
“No one may know these things before the fact. If you wish to discover what rebirth will do to you—you must accept rebirth.”
“If I asked for rebirth would I be permitted to have it?”
“I told you when we first met,” said Na-sinisul, “that no one on this world will prevent you from doing anything. You were not stopped as you ascended the mountain of rebirth. You were not stopped when you explored these chambers. Rebirth will not be denied you if you feel you need to experience it.”
Easily, serenely, instantly, Gundersen said, “Then I ask for rebirth.”
XVI
Silently, unsurprised, Na-sinisul leads him to a vacant cell and gestures to him to remove his clothing. Gundersen strips. His fingers fumble only slightly with the snaps and catches. At the sulidor’s direction Gundersen lies on the floor, as all other candidates for rebirth have done. The stone is so cold that he hisses when his bare skin touches it. Na-sinisul goes out. Gundersen looks up at the glowing fungoids in the distant vault of the ceiling. The chamber is large enough to hold a nildor comfortably—to Gundersen on the floor, it seems immense.
Na-sinisul returns, bearing a bowl made from a hollow log. He offers it to Gundersen. The bowl contains a pale blue fluid.
“Drink,” says the sulidor softly.
Gundersen drinks.
The taste is sweet, like sugar water. This is something he has tasted before and he knows when it was: at the serpent station, years ago. It is the forbidden venom. He drains the bowl and Na-sinisul leaves him.
Two sulidoror whom Gundersen does not know enter the cell. They kneel on either side of him and begin a low, mumbling chant, some sort of ritual. He cannot understand any of it. They knead and stroke his body—their hands, with the fearful claws retracted, are strangely soft, like the pads of a cat. He is tense but the tension ebbs. He feels the drug taking effect now—a thickness at the back of his head, a tightness in his chest, a blurring of his vision. Na-sinisul is in the room again, although Gundersen did not see him enter. He carries a bowl.
“Drink,” he says and Gundersen drinks.
It is another fluid entirely—or perhaps a different distillate of the venom. Its flavor is bitter, with undertastes of smoke and ash. He has to force himself to get to the bottom of the bowl but Na-sinisul waits, silently insistent, for him to finish it. Again the old sulidor leaves. At the mouth of the cell he turns and says something to Gundersen but the words are overgrown with heavy blue fur and will not enter Gundersen’s ears.
“What did you say?” the Earthman asks. “What? What?”
His words sprout leaden weights, teardrop-shaped, somber. They fall at once to the floor and shatter. One of the chanting sulidoror sweeps the broken words into a corner with a quick motion of his tail.
Gundersen hears a trickling sound, a glittering spiral of noise, as of water running into his cell. His eyes are closed but he feels the wetness swirling about him. It is not water, though. It has a more solid texture. A sort of gelatin, perhaps. Lying on his back he is several centimeters deep in it and the level is rising. It is cool but not cold and it insulates him nicely from the chill rock of the floor. He is aware of the faint pink odor of the inflowing gelatin, and of its firm consistency, like the tones of a bassoon in its deepest register. The sulidoror continue to chant. He feels a tube sliding into his mouth, a sleek piccolo-shriek of a tube, and through its narrow core drips yet another substance, thick oily, emitting the sound of muted kettledrums as it hits his palate.
Now the gelatin has reached the lower curve of his jaw. He welcomes its advance. It laps gently at his chin. The tube is withdrawn from his mouth just as the flow of gelatin covers his lips.
Will I be able to breathe?
A sulidor answers him in cryptic Sumerian phrases, and Gundersen is reassured.
He is wholly sealed in the gelatin. It covers the floor of the chamber to a depth of one meter. Light dimly penetrates it. Gundersen knows that its upper surface is smooth and flawless, forming a perfect seal where it touches the walls of the cell. Now he has become a chrysalis. He will be given nothing more to drink. He will lie here and he will be reborn.
One must die in order that one may be reborn, he knows.
DEATH comes to him and enfolds him. Gently he slides into a dark abyss. The embrace of death is tender. Gundersen floats through a realm of trembling emptiness. He hovers suspended in the black void. Bands of scarlet and purple light transfix him, buffeting him like bars of metal. He tumbles. He spins. He soars.
He encounters death once more and they wrestle and he is defeated by death. His body is shivered into splinters and a shower of bright Gundersen-fragments scatters through space.
The fragments seek one another. They solemnly circle one another. They dance. They unite. They take on the form of Edmund Gundersen, but this new Gundersen glows like pure, transparent glass. He is glistening, a transparent man through whom the light of the great sun at the core of the universe passes without resistance. A spectrum spreads forth from his chest. The brilliance of his body illuminates the galaxies.
Strands of color emanate from him and link him to all who possess g’rakh in the universe.
He partakes of the biological wisdom of the cosmos.
He tunes his soul to the essence of what is and what must be.
He is without limits. He can reach out and touch any soul. He reaches toward the soul of Na-sinisul and the sulidor greets him and admits him. He reaches toward Srin’gahar, toward Vol’himyor the many-born, toward Luu’khamin, Se-holomir, Yi-gartigok, toward the nildoror and sulidoror who lie in the caves of metamorphosis and toward the dwellers in the misty forests and toward the dwellers in the steaming jungles and toward those who dance and rage in the forlorn plateau and to all others of Belzagor who share in g’rakh.
And he comes now to one that is neither nildor nor sulidor, a sleeping soul, a veiled soul, a soul of a color and timber and a texture unlike the others. It is an Earthborn soul, the soul of Seena, and he calls softly to her, saying, Awaken, awaken, I love you, I have come for you. She does not awaken. He calls to her, lam new, lam reborn, I overflow with love. Join me. Become part of me. Seena? Seena? Seena? And she does not respond.
He sees the souls of the other Earthmen now. They have g’rakh but rationality is not enough—their souls are blind and silent. Here is Van Beneker; here are the tourists; here are the lonely keepers of solitary outposts in the jungle. Here is the charred gray emptiness where the soul of Cedric Cullen belongs.
He cannot reach any of them.
He moves on, and a new soul gleams beyond the mist. It is the soul of Kurtz. Kurtz comes to him or he goes to Kurtz and Kurtz is not asleep.
Now you are among us, Kurtz says and Gundersen says, Yes, here I am at last. Soul opens to soul and Gundersen looks down into the darkness that is Kurtz, past the pearl-gray curtain that shrouds his spirit, into a place of terror where black figures shuttle with many legs along ridged webs. Chaotic forms cohere, expand, dissolve within Kurtz. Gundersen looks beyond this dark and dismal zone. Beyond it he finds a cold, hard, bright light shining whitely out of the deepest place and Kurtz says, See? Do you see? Am I a monster? I have goodness within me.
You are not a monster. Gundersen says.
But I have suffered, says Kurtz.
For your sins, Gundersen says.
I have paid for my sins with my suffering and I should now be released.
You have suffered, Gundersen agrees.
When will my suffering end, then?
Gundersen replies that he does not know, that it is not he who sets the limits of such things.
Kurtz says, I knew you. Nice young fellow, a little slow. Seena speaks highly of you. Sometimes she wishes things had worked out better for you and her. Instead she got me. Here I lie. Here lie we. Why won’t you release me?
What can I do, asks Gundersen?
Let me come back to the mountain. Let me finish my rebirth.
Gundersen does not know how to respond. He seeks along the circuit of g’rakh, consulting Na-sinisul, consulting Vol’himyor, consulting all the many-born ones and they join, they join, they speak with one voice, they tell Gundersen in a voice of thunder that Kurtz is finished, his rebirth is over, he may not come back to the mountain.
Gundersen repeats this to Kurtz but Kurtz has already heard. Kurtz shrivels. Kurtz shrinks back into darkness. He comes enmeshed in his own webs.
Pity me, he calls out to Gundersen across a vast gulf. Pity me, for this is hell and lam in it.
Gundersen says, I pity you. I pity you. I pity you. I pity you.
THE echo of his own voice diminishes to infinity. All is silent. Out of the void, suddenly, comes Kurtz’ wordless reply, a shrill and deafening crescendo blast of rage and hatred and malevolence, the scream of a flawed Prometheus flailing at the beak that pierces him. The shriek reaches a climax of shattering intensity. It dies away. The shivering fabric of the universe grows still again. A soft violet light appears, absorbing the lingering disharmonies of that one terrible outcry.
Gundersen weeps for Kurtz.
The cosmos streams with shining tears and on that salty river Gundersen floats, traveling without will, visiting this world and that, drifting among the nebulae, passing through clouds of cosmic dust, soaring over strange suns.
He is not alone. Na-sinisul is with him and Srin’gahar—and Vol’himyor and all the others.
He becomes aware of the harmony of all things g’rakh. He sees for the first time the bonds that bind g’rakh to g’rakh. He who lies in rebirth is in contact with them all but also they are each in contact with one another at any time, at every time, every soul on the planet joined in wordless communication.
He sees the unity of all g’rakh and it awes and humbles him.
He perceives the complexity of this double people, the rhythm of its existence, the unending and infinite swing of cycle upon cycle of rebirth and new creation, above all the union, the oneness. He perceives his own monstrous isolation, the walls that cut him off from other men, that cut off man from man, each a prisoner in his own skull. He sees what it is like to live among people who have learned to liberate the prisoner in the skull.
That knowledge dwindles and crushes him. He thinks, We made them slaves, we called them beasts and all the time they were linked, they spoke in their minds without words, they transmitted the music of the soul one to one to one. We were alone and they were not and instead of kneeling before them and begging to share the miracle we gave them work to do.
Gundersen weeps for Gundersen.
Na-sinisul says, This is no time for sorrow and Srin’gahar says, The past is past. Vol’himyor says, Through remorse you are redeemed. And all of them speak with one voice and at one time and he understands. He understands.
Now Gundersen understands all.
He knows that nildor and sulidor are not two separate species but merely forms of the same creature, no more different than caterpillar and butterfly. He is aware of how it was for the nildoror when they were still in their primeval state, when they were born as nildoror and died helplessly as nildoror, perishing when the inevitable decay of their souls came upon them. And he knows the fear and the ecstasy of those first few nildoror who accepted the serpent’s temptation and drank the drug of liberation and became things with fur and claws, misshapen, malformed, transmuted. And he knows their pain as they were driven out, even into the plateau where no being possessing g’rakh would venture.
And he knows their sufferings in that plateau.
And he knows the triumph of those first sulidoror, who, surmounting their isolation, returned from the wilderness bearing a new creed. Come and be changed, come and be changed! Give up this flesh for another! Graze no more but hunt and eat flesh! Be reborn and live again and conquer the brooding body that drags the spirit to destruction!
And he sees the nildoror accepting their destiny and giving themselves up joyfully to rebirth—a few and then more and then more. And then whole encampments, entire populations, going forth, not to hide in the plateau of purification but to live in the new way, in the land where mist rules. They cannot resist because with the change of body comes the blessed liberation of soul, the unity, the bond of g’rakh to g’rakh.
