“You think that staging the local equivalent of a Black Mass is what brought Kurtz to whatever destiny it is that you’re hiding from me?”

“I know it,” Seena replied. She got to her feet, stretched voluptuously, and beckoned to him. “Let’s go back to the station now.”

As though this were time’s first dawn they walked naked through the garden, close together, the warmth of the sun and the warmth of her body stirring him and raising a fever in him. Twice he considered pulling her to the ground and taking her amidst these alien shrubs, and twice he held back, not knowing why. When they were a dozen meters from the house he felt desire climb again, and he turned to her and put his hand on her breast. But she said, “Tell me one more thing, first.”

“If I can.”

“Why have you come back to Belzagor? Really. What draws you to the mist country?”

He said, “If you believe in sin, you must believe in the possibility of redemption from sin.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I have a sin on my conscience, too. Perhaps not as grave a sin as the sins of Kurtz, but enough to trouble me, and I’ve come back here as an act of expiation.”

“How have you sinned?” she asked.

“I sinned against the nildoror in the ordinary Earthman way, by collaborating in their enslavement, by patronizing them, by failing to credit their intelligence and their complexity. In particular I sinned by preventing seven nildoror from reaching rebirth on time. Do you remember, when the Monroe dam broke, and I commandeered those pilgrims for a labor detail? I used a fusion torch to make them obey, and on my account they missed rebirth. I didn’t know that if they were late for rebirth they’d lose their turn, and if I had known I wouldn’t have thought it mattered. Sin within sin within sin. I left here feeling stained. Those seven nildoror bothered me in my dreams. I realized that I had to come back and try to cleanse my soul.”

“What kind of expiation do you have in mind?” she asked.

His eyes had difficulty meeting hers. He lowered them, but that was worse, for the nakedness of her unnerved him even more, as they stood together in the sunlight outside the station. He forced his glance upward again.

He said, “I’ve determined to find out what rebirth is, and to take part in it. I’m going to offer myself to the sulidoror as a candidate.”

“No.”

“Seena, what’s wrong? You—”

She trembled. Her cheeks were blazing, and the rush of scarlet spread even to her breasts. She bit her lip, spun away from him, and turned back. “It’s insanity,” she said. “Rebirth isn’t something for Earthmen. Why do you think you can possibly expiate anything by getting yourself mixed up in an alien religion, by surrendering yourself to a process none of us knows anything about, by—”

“I have to, Seena.”

“Don’t be crazy.”

“It’s an obsession. You’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to about it. The nildoror I’m traveling with aren’t aware of it. I can’t stop. I owe this planet a life, and I’m here to pay. I have to go, regardless of the consequences.”

She said, “Come inside the station with me.” Her voice was flat, mechanical, empty.

“Why?”

“Come inside.”

He followed her silently in. She led him to the middle level of the building, and into a corridor blocked by one of her robot guardians. At a nod from her the robot stepped aside. Outside a room at the rear she paused and put her hand to the door’s scanner. The door rolled back. Seena gestured to him to walk in with her.

He heard the grunting, snorting sound that he had heard the night before, and now there was no doubt in his mind that it had been a cry of terrible throttled pain.

“This is the room where Kurtz spends his time,” Seena said. She drew a curtain that had divided the room. “And this is Kurtz,” she said.

“It isn’t possible,” Gundersen murmured. “How— how—”

“How did he get that way?”

“Yes.”

“As he grew older he began to feel remorse for the crimes he had committed. He suffered greatly in his guilt, and last year he resolved to undertake an act of expiation. He decided to travel to the mist country and undergo rebirth. This is what they brought back to me. This is what a human being looks like, Edmund, when he’s undergone rebirth.”

Eleven

WHAT GUNDERSEN BEHELD was apparently human, and probably it had once even been Jeff Kurtz. The absurd length of the body was surely Kurtzlike, for the figure in the bed seemed to be a man and a half long, as if an extra section of vertebrae and perhaps a second pair of femurs had been spliced in. The skull was plainly Kurtz’s too: mighty white dome, jutting brow-ridges. The ridges were even more prominent than Gundersen remembered. They rose above Kurtz’s closed eyes like barricades guarding against some invasion from the north. But the thick black brows that had covered those ridges were gone. So were the lush, almost feminine eyelashes.

Below the forehead the face was unrecognizable.

It was as if everything had been heated in a crucible and allowed to melt and run. Kurtz’s fine high-bridged nose was now a rubbery smear, so snoutlike that Gundersen was jolted by its resemblance to a sulidor’s. His wide mouth now had slack, pendulous lips that drooped open, revealing toothless gums. His chin sloped backward in pithecanthropoid style. Kurtz’s cheekbones were flat and broad, wholly altering the planes of his face.

Seena drew the coverlet down to display the rest. The body in the bed was utterly hairless, a long boiled-looking pink thing like a giant slug. All superfluous flesh was gone, and the skin lay like a shroud over plainly visible ribs and muscles. The proportions of the body were wrong. Kurtz’s waist was an impossibly great distance from his chest, and his legs, though long, were not nearly as long as they should have been; his ankles seemed to crowd his knees. His toes had fused, so that his feet terminated in bestial pads. Perhaps by compensation, his fingers had added extra joints and were great spidery things that flexed and clenched in irregular rhythms. The attachment of his arms to his torso appeared strange, though it was not until Gundersen saw Kurtz slowly rotate his left arm through a 360-degree twist that he realized the armpit must have been reconstructed into some kind of versatile ball-and-socket arrangement.

Kurtz struggled desperately to speak, blurting words in a language Gundersen had never heard. His eyeballs visibly stirred beneath his lids. His tongue slipped forth to moisten his lips. Something like a three-lobed Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Briefly he humped his body, drawing the skin tight over curiously broadened bones. He continued to speak. Occasionally an intelligible word in English or nildororu emerged, embedded in a flow of gibberish: “River … death … lost … horror … river … cave … warm … lost … warm … smash … black … go … god … horror … born … lost … born …”

“What is he saying?” Gundersen asked.

“No one knows. Even when we can understand the words, he doesn’t make sense. And mostly we can’t even understand the words. He speaks the language of the world where he must live now. It’s a very private language.”

“Has he been conscious at all since he’s been here?”

“Not really,” Seena said. “Sometimes his eyes are open, but he never responds to anything around him. Come. Look.” She went to the bed and drew Kurtz’s eyelids open. Gundersen saw eyes that had no whites at all. From rim to rim their shining surfaces were a deep, lustrous black, dappled by random spots of light blue. He held three fingers up before those eyes and waved his hand from side to side. Kurtz took no notice. Seena released the lids, and the eyes remained open, even when the tips of Gundersen’s fingers approached quite closely. But as Gundersen withdrew his hand, Kurtz lifted his right hand and seized Gundersen’s wrist. The grotesquely elongated fingers encircled the wrist completely, met, and coiled halfway around it again. Slowly and with tremendous strength Kurtz pulled Gundersen down until he was kneeling beside the bed.