“Then there’s to be no nonaggression pact?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” She turned toward him, took his hand from her thigh, pressed it tenderly between her breasts, brushed her lips against it. “All right, we’ve been playing little games. They’re over, and now we’ll speak only truth, but you go first. Did the nildoror ask you to bring Ced Cullen out of the mist country?”

“Yes,” Gundersen said. “It was the condition of my entry.”

“And you promised you’d do it?”

“I made certain reservations and qualifications, Seena. If he won’t go willingly, I’m not bound by honor to force him. But I do have to find him, at least. That much I’ve pledged. So I ask you again to tell me where I should look.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea. He could be anywhere at all up there.”

“Is this the truth?”

“The truth,” she said, and for a moment the harshness was gone from her eyes, and her voice was the voice of a woman and not that of a cello.

“Can you tell me, at least, why he fled, why they want him so eagerly?”

She was slow in replying. Finally she said, “About a year ago, he went down into the central plateau on one of his regular collecting trips. He was planning to get me another medusa, he said. Most of the time I went with him into the plateau, but this time Kurtz was ill and I had to stay behind. Ced went to a part of the plateau we had never visited before, and there he found a group of nildoror taking part in some kind of religious ceremony. He stumbled right into them and evidently he profaned the ritual.”

“Rebirth?” Gundersen asked.

“No, they do rebirth only in the mist country. This was something else, something almost as serious, it seems. The nildoror were furious. Ced barely escaped alive. He came back here and said he was in great trouble, that the nildoror wanted him, that he had committed some sort of sacrilege and had to take sanctuary. Then he went north, with a posse of nildoror chasing him right to the border. I haven’t heard anything since. I have no contact with the mist country. And that’s all I can tell you.”

“You haven’t told me what sort of sacrilege he committed,” Gundersen pointed out.

“I don’t know it. I don’t know what kind of ritual it was, or what he did to interrupt it. I’ve told you only as much as he told me. Will you believe that?”

“I’ll believe it,” he said. He smiled. “Now let’s play another game, and this time I’ll take lead. Last night you told me that Kurtz was off on a trip, that you hadn’t seen him for a long time and didn’t know when he’d be back. You also said he’d been sick, but you brushed over that pretty quickly. This morning, the robot who brought me breakfast said that you’d be late coming down, because Kurtz was ill and you were with him in his room, as you were every morning at this time. Robots don’t ordinarily lie.”

“The robot wasn’t lying. I was.”

“Why?”

“To shield him from you,” Seena said. “He’s in very bad shape, and I don’t want him to be disturbed. And I knew that if I told you he was here, you’d want to see him. He isn’t strong enough for visitors. It was an innocent lie, Edmund.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“We aren’t sure. You know, there isn’t much of a medical service left on this planet. I’ve got a diagnostat, but it gave me no useful data when I put him through it. I suppose I could describe his disease as a kind of cancer. Only cancer isn’t what he has.”

“Can you describe the symptoms?”

“What’s the use? His body began to change. He became something strange and ugly and frightening, and you don’t need to know the details. If you thought that what had happened to Dykstra and Pauleen was horrible, you’d be rocked to your roots by Kurtz. But I won’t let you see him. It’s as much to shield you from him as the other way around. You’ll be better off not seeing him.” Seena sat up, cross-legged on the rock, and began to untangle the wet snarled strands of her hair. Gundersen thought he had never seen her looking as beautiful as she looked right at this moment, clothed only in alien sunlight, her flesh taut and ripe and glowing, her body supple, full-blown, mature. And the fierceness of her eyes, the one jarring discordancy? Had that come from viewing, each morning, the horror that Kurtz now was? She said after a long while, “Kurtz is being punished for his sins.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I do,” she said. “I believe that there are such things as sins, and that there is retribution for sin.”

“And that an old man with a white beard is up there in the sky, keeping score on everyone, running the show, tallying up an adultery here, a lie there, a spot of gluttony, a little pride?”

“I have no idea who runs the show,” said Seena. “I’m not even sure that anyone does. Don’t mislead yourself, Edmund: I’m not trying to import medieval theology to Belzagor. I won’t give you the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and say that all over the universe certain fundamental principles hold true. I simply say that here on Belzagor we live in the presence of certain moral absolutes, native to this planet, and if a stranger comes to Belzagor and transgresses against those absolutes, he’ll regret it. This world is not ours, never was, never will be, and we who live here are in a constant state of peril, because we don’t understand the basic rules.”

“What sins did Kurtz commit?”

“It would take me all morning to name them,” she said. “Some were sins against the nildoror, and some were sins against his own spirit.”

“We all committed sins against the nildoror,” Gundersen said.

“In a sense, yes. We were proud and foolish, and we failed to see them for what they were, and we used them unkindly. That’s a sin, yes, of course, a sin that our ancestors committed all over Earth long before we went into space. But Kurtz had a greater capacity for sin than the rest of us, because he was a greater man. Angels have farther to fall, once they fall.”

“What did Kurtz do to the nildoror? Kill them? Dissect them? Whip them?”

“Those are sins against their bodies,” said Seena. “He did worse.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you know what used to go on at the serpent station, south of the spaceport?”

“I was there for a few weeks with Kurtz and Salamone,” Gundersen said. “Long ago, when I was very new here, when you were still a child on Earth. I watched the two of them call serpents out of the jungle, and milk the raw venom from them, and give the venom to nildoror to drink. And drink the venom themselves.”

“And what happened then?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never been able to understand it. When I tried it with them, I had the illusion that the three of us were turning into nildoror. And that three nildoror had turned into us. I had a trunk, four legs, tusks, spines. Everything looked different; I was seeing through nildoror eyes. Then it ended, and I was in my own body again, and I felt a terrible rush of guilt, of shame. I had no way of knowing whether it had been a real bodily metamorphosis or just hallucination.”

“It was hallucination,” Seena told him. “The venom opened your mind, your soul, and enabled you to enter the nildor consciousness, at the same time that the nildor was entering yours. For a little while that nildor thought he was Edmund Gundersen. Such a dream is great ecstasy to a nildor.”

“Is this Kurtz’s sin, then? To give ecstasy to nildoror?”

“The serpent venom,” Seena said, “is also used in the rebirth ceremony. What you and Kurtz and Salamone were doing down there in the jungle was going through a very mild — verymild — version of rebirth. And so were the nildoror. But it was blasphemous rebirth for them, for many reasons. First, because it was held in the wrong place. Second, because it done without the proper rituals. Third, because the celebrants who guided the nildoror were men, not sulidoror, and so the entire thing became a wicked parody of the most sacred act this planet has. By giving those nildoror the venom, Kurtz was tempting them to dabble in something diabolical, literally diabolical. Few nildoror can resist that temptation. He found pleasure in the act — both in the hallucinations that the venom gave him, and in the tempting of the nildoror. I think that he enjoyed the tempting even more than the hallucinations, and that was his worst sin, for through it he led innocent nildoror into what passes for damnation on this planet. In twenty years on Belzagor he inveigled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nildoror into sharing a bowl of venom with him. Finally his presence became intolerable, and his own hunger for evil became the source of his destruction. And now he lies upstairs, neither living nor dead, no longer a danger to anything on Belzagor.”