The sulidor was at his side. Gundersen said, “Something’s inside their bodies. Some kind of parasite? It moves. What is it?”

“Look there,” said Na-sinisul, indicating the spongy basket from which the dark fluid trickled. “They carry its young. They have become hosts. A year, two years, perhaps three, and the larvae will emerge.”

“Why aren’t they both dead?”

“They draw nourishment from this,” said the sulidor, swishing his tail through the black flow. “It seeps into their skins. It feeds them, and it feeds that which is within them.”

“If we took them out of here and sent them down to the hotel on rafts — ?”

“They would die,” Na-sinisul said, “moments after they were removed from the wetness about them. There is no hope of saving them.”

“When does it end?” the woman asked.

Gundersen trembled. All his training told him never to accept the finality of death; any human in whom some shred of life remained could be saved, rebuilt from a few scraps of cells into a reasonable facsimile of the original. But there were no facilities for such things on this world. He confronted a swirl of choices. Leave them here to let alien things feed upon their guts; try to bring them back to the spaceport for shipment to the nearest tectogenetic hospital; put them out of their misery at once; seek to free their bodies himself of whatever held them in thrall. He knelt again. He forced himself to experience that inner quivering again. He touched the woman’s stomach, her thighs, her bony haunches. Beneath the skin she was a mass of strangeness. Yet her mind still ticked, though she had forgotten her name and her native language. The man was luckier; though he was infested too, at least Dykstra did not have to lie here in the dark waiting for the death that could come only when the harbored larvae erupted from the enslaved human flesh. Was this what they had desired, when they refused repatriation from this world that they loved? An Earthman can become captured by Belzagor, the many-born nildor Vol’himyor had said. But this was too literal a capture.

The stink of bodily corruption made him retch.

“Kill them both,” he said to Na-sinisul. “And be quick about it.”

“This is what you instruct me to do?”

“Kill them. And rip down that thing on the wall and kill it too.”

“It has given no offense,” said the sulidor. “It has done only what is natural to its kind. By killing these two, I will deprive it of its young, but I am not willing to deprive it of life as well.”

“All right,” Gundersen said. “Just the Earthmen, then. Fast.”

“I do this as an act of mercy, under your direct orders,” said Na-sinisul. He leaned forward and lifted one powerful arm. The savage curved claws emerged fully from their sheath. The arm descended twice.

Gundersen compelled himself to watch. The bodies split like dried husks; the things within came spilling out, unformed, raw. Even now, in some inconceivable reflex, the two corpses twitched and jerked. Gundersen stared into their eroded depths. “Do you hear me?” he asked. “Are you alive or dead?” The woman’s mouth gaped but no sound came forth, and he did not know whether this was an attempt to speak or merely a last convulsion of the ravaged nerves. He stepped his fusion torch up to high power and trained it on the dark pool. I am the resurrection and the life, he thought, reducing Dykstra to ashes, and the woman beside him, and the squirming unfinished larvae. Acrid, choking fumes rose; not even the torch could destroy the building’s dampness. He turned the torch back to illumination level. “Come,” he said to the sulidor, and they went out together.

“I feel like burning the entire building and purifying this place,” Gundersen said to Na-sinisul.

“I know.”

“But you would prevent me.”

“You are wrong. No one on this world will prevent you from doing anything.”

But what good would it do, Gundersen asked himself. The purification had already been accomplished. He had removed the only beings in this place that were foreign to it.

The rain had stopped. To the waiting Srin’gahar, Gundersen said, “Will you take me away from here?”

They rejoined the other four nildoror. Then, because they had lingered too long here and the land of rebirth was still far away, they resumed the march, even though it was night. By morning Gundersen could hear the thunder of Shangri-la Falls, which the nildoror called Du’jayukh.

Nine

IT WAS AS though a white wall of water descended from the sky. Nothing on Earth could match the triple plunge of this cataract, by which Madden’s River, or the Seran’nee, dropped five hundred meters, and then six hundred, and then five hundred more, falling from ledge to ledge in its tumble toward the sea. Gundersen and the five nildoror stood at the foot of the falls, where the entire violent cascade crashed into a broad rock-flanged basin out of which the serpentine river continued its southeasterly course; the sulidor had taken his leave in the night and was proceeding northward by his own route. To Gundersen’s rear lay the coastal plain, behind his right shoulder, and the central plateau, behind his left. Before him, up by the head of the falls, the northern plateau began, the highlands that controlled the approach to the mist country. Just as a titanic north-south rift cut the coastal plain off from the central plateau, so did another rift running east-west separate both the central plateau and the coastal plain from the highlands ahead.

He bathed in a crystalline pool just beyond the tumult of the cataract, and then they began their ascent. The Shangri-la Station, one of the Company’s most important outposts, was invisible from below; it was set back a short way from the head of the falls. Once there had been waystations at the foot of the falls and at the head of the middle cataract, but no trace of these structures remained; the jungle had swallowed them utterly in only eight years. A winding road, with an infinity of switchbacks, led to the top. When he first had seen it, Gundersen had imagined it was the work of Company engineers, but he had learned that it was a natural ridge in the face of the plateau, which the nildoror themselves had enlarged and deepened to make their journey toward rebirth more easy.

The swaying rhythm of his mount lulled him into a doze; he held tight to Srin’gahar’s pommel-like horns and prayed that in his grogginess he would not fall off. Once he woke suddenly and found himself clinging only by his left hand, with his body half slung out over a sheer drop of at least two hundred meters. Another time, drowsy again, he felt cold spray and snapped to attention to see the entire cascade of the falling river rushing past him no more than a dozen meters away. At the head of the lowest cataract the nildoror paused to eat, and Gundersen dashed icy water in his face to shatter his sluggishness. They went on. He had less difficulty keeping awake now; the air was thinner, and the afternoon breeze was cool. In the hour before twilight they reached the head of the falls.

Shangri-la Station, seemingly unchanged, lay before him; three rectangular unequal blocks of dark shimmering plastic, a somber ziggurat rising on the western bank of the narrow gorge through which the river sped. The formal gardens of tropical plants, established by a forgotten sector chief at least forty years before, looked as though they were being carefully maintained. At each of the building’s setbacks there was an outdoor veranda overlooking the river, and these, too, were bedecked with plants. Gundersen felt a dryness in his throat and a tightness in his loins. He said to Srin’gahar, “How long may we stay here?”

“How long do you wish to stay?”

“One day, two — I don’t know yet. It depends on the welcome I get.”

“We are not yet in a great hurry,” said the nildor. “My friends and I will make camp in the bush. When it is time for you to go on, come to us.”