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Downward to the Earth

by Robert Silverberg

Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

ECCLESIASTES 3:21

One

HE HAD COME back to Holman’s World after all. He was not sure why. Call it irresistible attraction; call it sentimentality; call it foolishness. Gundersen had never planned to revisit this place. Yet here he was, waiting for the landing, and there it was in the vision screen, close enough to grasp and squeeze in one hand, a world slightly larger than Earth, a world that had claimed the prime decade of his life, a world where he had learned things about himself that he had not really wanted to know. Now the signal light in the lounge was flashing red. The ship would shortly land. Despite everything, he was coming back.

“Attention, passengers in lounge,” came a voice over the speaker. “We enter landing orbit for Belzagor in fifteen minutes. Please prepare to return to cradles. ”

Belzagor. That was what they called the planet now. The native name, the nildoror’s own word. To Gundersen it seemed like something out of Assyrian mythology. Of course, it was a romanticized pronunciation; coming from a nildor it would really sound more like Bllls’grr. Belzagor it was, though.

He would try to call the planet by the name it now wore, if that was what he was supposed to do. He attempted never to give needless offense to alien beings.

“Belzagor,” he said. “It’s a voluptuous sound, isn’t it? Rolls nicely off the tongue. ”

The tourist couple beside him in the ship’s lounge nodded. They agreed readily with whatever Gundersen said. The husband, plump, pale, overdressed, said, “They were still calling it Holman’s World when you were last out here, weren’t they?”

“Oh, yes,” Gundersen said. “But that was back in the good old imperialist days, when an Earthman could call a planet whatever he damn pleased. That’s all over now. ”

The tourist wife’s lips tightened in that thin, pinched, dysmenorrheal way of hers. Gundersen drew a somber pleasure from annoying her. All during the voyage he had deliberately played a role out of Kipling for these tourists — posing as the former colonial administrator going out to see what a beastly botch the natives must be making out of the task of governing themselves. It was an exaggeration, a distortion, of his real attitude, but sometimes it pleased him to wear masks. The tourist — there were eight of them — looked upon him in mingled awe and contempt as he swaggered among them, a big fair-skinned man with the mark of outworld experience stamped on his features. They disapproved of him, of the image of himself that he gave them; and yet they knew he had suffered and labored and striven under a foreign sun, and there was romance in that.