A sulidor approached him and stood over him. Gundersen stared up uneasily at the towering shaggy figure. The sulidor held in its forepaws a gobbet of malidar meat the size of Gundersen’s head.
“For you,” said the sulidor in the nildoror language. “You eat with us?”
It did not wait for a reply. It tossed the slab of flesh to the ground next to Gundersen and rejoined its fellows. Gundersen’s stomach writhed. He had no lust for raw meat just now.
The beach was suddenly very silent.
They were all watching him, sulidoror and nildoror both.
Five
SHAKILY GUNDERSEN GOT to his feet. He sucked warm air into his lungs and bought a little time by crouching at the lake’s edge to wash his face. He found his discarded clothing and consumed a few minutes by getting it on. Now he felt a little better; but the problem of the raw meat remained. The sulidoror, enjoying their feast, rending and tearing flesh and gnawing on bones, nevertheless frequently looked his way to see whether he would accept their hospitality. The nildoror, who of course had not touched the meat themselves, also seemed curious about his decision. If he refused the meat, would he offend the sulidoror? If he ate it, would he stamp himself as bestial in the eyes of the nildoror? He concluded that it was best to force some of the meat into him, as a gesture of good will toward the menacing-looking bipeds. The nildoror, after all, did not seem troubled that the sulidoror were eating meat; why should it bother them if an Earthman, a known carnivore, did the same?
He would eat the meat. But he would eat it as an Earthman would.
He ripped some leaves from the water-plant and spread them out to form a mat; he placed the meat on this. From his tunic he took his fusion torch, which he adjusted for wide aperture, low intensity, and played on the meat until its outer surface was charred and bubbling. With a narrower beam he cut the cooked meat into chunks he could manage. Then, squatting cross-legged, he picked up a chunk and bit into it.
The meat was soft and cheesy, interlaced by tough stringlike masses forming an intricate grid. By will alone Gundersen succeeded in getting three pieces down. When he decided he had had enough, he rose, called out his thanks to the sulidoror, and knelt by the side of the lake to scoop up some of the water. He needed a chaser.
During all this time no one spoke to him or approached him.
The nildoror had all left the water, for night was approaching. They had settled down in several groups well back from the shore. The feast of the sulidoror continued noisily, but was nearing its end; already several small scavenger-beasts had joined the party, and were at work at the lower half of the malidar’s body while the sulidoror finished the other part.
Gundersen looked about for Srin’gahar. There were things he wished to ask.
It still troubled him that the nildoror had accepted the killing in the lake so coolly. He realized that he had somehow always regarded the nildoror as more noble than the other big beasts of this planet because they did not take life except under supreme provocation, and sometimes not even then. Here was an intelligent race exempt from the sin of Cain. And Gundersen saw in that a corollary: that the nildoror, because they did not kill, would look upon killing as a detestable act. Now he knew that his reasoning was faulty and even naпve. The nildoror did not kill simply because they were not eaters of meat; but the moral superiority that he had attributed to them on that score must in fact be a product of his own guilty imagination.
The night came on with tropic swiftness. A single moon glimmered. Gundersen saw a nildor he took to be Srin’gahar, and went to him.
“I have a question, Srin’gahar, friend of my journey,” Gundersen began. “When the sulidoror entered the water—”
The nildor said gravely, “You make a mistake. I am Thali’vanoom of the third birth.”
Gundersen mumbled an apology and turned away, aghast. What a typically Earthman blunder, he thought. He remembered his old sector chief making the same blunder a dozen dozen times, hopelessly confusing one nildor with another and muttering angrily, “Can’t tell one of these big bastards from the next! Why don’t they wear badges?” The ultimate insult, the failure to recognize the natives as individuals. Gundersen had always made it a point of honor to avoid such gratuitous insults. And so, here, at this delicate time when he depended wholly on winning the favor of the nildoror—
He approached a second nildor, and saw just at the last moment that this one too was not Srin’gahar. He backed off as gracefully as he could. On the third attempt he finally found his traveling companion. Srin’gahar sat placidly against a narrow tree, his thick legs folded beneath his body. Gundersen put his question to him and Srin’gahar said, “Why should the sight of violent death shock us? Malidaror have no g’rakh, after all. And it is obvious that sulidoror must eat.”
“No g’rakh?” Gundersen said. “This is a word I do not know.”
“The quality that separates the souled from the unsouled,” Srin’gahar explained. “Without g’rakh a creature is but a beast.”
“Do sulidoror have g’rakh?”
“Of course.”
“And nildoror also, naturally. But malidaror don’t. What about Earthmen?”
“It is amply clear that Earthmen have g’rakh.”
“And one may freely kill a creature which lacks that quality?”
“If one has the need to do so, yes,” said Srin’gahar. “These are elementary matters. Have you no such concepts on your own world?”
“On my world,” said Gundersen, “there is only one species that has been granted g’rakh, and so perhaps we give such matters too little thought. We know that whatever is not of our own kind must be lacking in g’rakh.”
“And so, when you come to another world, you have difficulty in accepting the presence of g’rakh in other beings?” Srin’gahar asked. “You need not answer. I understand.”
“May I ask another question?” said Gundersen. “Why are there sulidoror here?”
“We allow them to be here.”
“In the past, in the days when the Company ruled Belzagor, the sulidoror never went outside the mist country.”
“We did not allow them to come here then.”
“But now you do. Why?”
“Because now it is easier for us to do so. Difficulties stood in the way at earlier times.”
“What kind of difficulties?” Gundersen persisted.
Softly Srin’gahar said, “You will have to ask that of someone who has been born more often than I. I am once-born, and many things are as strange to me as they are to you. Look, another moon is in the sky! At the third moon we shall dance.”
Gundersen looked up and saw the tiny white disk moving rapidly, low in sky, seemingly skimming the fringe of the treetops. Belzagor’s five moons were a random assortment, the closest one just outside Roche’s Limit, the farthest so distant it was visible only to sharp eyes on a clear night. At any given time two or three moons were in the night sky, but the fourth and fifth moons had such eccentric orbits that they could never be seen at all from vast regions of the planet, and passed over most other zones no more than three or four times a year. One night each year all five moons could be seen at once, just along a band ten kilometers wide running at an angle of about forty degrees to the equator from northeast to southwest. Gundersen had experienced the Night of Five Moons only a single time.
The nildoror were starting to move toward the lakeshore now.
The third moon appeared, spinning retrograde into view from the south.
So he was going to see them dance again. He had witnessed their ceremonies once before, early in his career, when he was stationed at Shangri-la Falls in the northern tropics. That night the nildoror had massed just upstream of the falls, on both banks of Madden’s River, and for hours after dark their blurred cries could be heard even above the roar of the water. And finally Kurtz, who was also stationed at Shangri-la then, said, “Come, let’s watch the show!” and led Gundersen out into the night. This was six months before the episode at the serpent station, and Gundersen did not then realize how strange Kurtz was. But he realized it quickly enough after Kurtz joined the nildoror in their dance. The huge beasts were clustered in loose semicircles, stamping back and forth, trumpeting piercingly, shaking the ground, and suddenly there was Kurtz out there among them, arms upflung, bare chest beaded with sweat and shining in the moonslight, dancing as intensely as any of them, crying out in great booming roars, stamping his feet, tossing his head. And the nildoror were forming a group around him, giving him plenty of space, letting him enter fully into the frenzy, now running toward him, now backing away, a systole and diastole of ferocious power. Gundersen stood awed, and did not move when Kurtz called to him to join the dance. He watched for what seemed like hours, hypnotized by the boom boom boom boom of the dancing nildoror, until in the end he broke from his trance, and searched for Kurtz and found him still in ceaseless motion, a gaunt bony skeletonic figure jerking puppet-like on invisible strings, looking fragile despite his extreme height as he moved within the circle of colossal nildoror. Kurtz could neither hear Gundersen’s words nor take note of his presence, and finally Gundersen went back to the station alone. In the morning he found Kurtz, looking spent and worn, slumped on the bench overlooking the waterfall. Kurtz merely said, “You should have stayed. You should have danced.”