Downward to the Earth is a 1970 science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg.
Edmund Gunderson was once a colonial administrator on the alien planet Belzagor, a tropical world home to elephant-like natives called the nildoror, who undergo a poorly-understood ritual of rebirth, and to a reclusive second species, the bipedal, roughly tapir-like sulidoror. He managed the Company's affairs, oversaw the extraction of natural resources, and tried to wrangle the natives into a useful workforce until a growing movement for the independence of inhabited worlds forced the Company to withdraw. Years later, he returns to Belzagor, seeking to find some form of absolution for his guilt over having participated in the oppression of the nildoror.
This novel contains examples of:
- Alien Sky: Belzagor has five moons at various distances. The closest three are usually visible in the night sky, usually either two or all together, but the farther two have distant and eccentric orbits that render them visible only in certain areas for a few times each year. They're all visible at once during a single night of the year, which is of significant spiritual importance to the nildoror.
- Body Horror: Kurtz has become hideously deformed as a result of his failed rebirth ceremony. When Gunderson finds him, he is completely hairless, with flabby, drooping lips over a toothless mouth, enlarged cheekbones, a pendulous nose, stunted limbs and an extended spine, fused toes, and multiple-jointed, spider-like hands mindlessly clenching and unclenching.
- Chest Burster: One of the organisms on Belzagor is a sessile, sponge-like creature that inserts its larvae inside of living beings. The larvae grow within their immobilized, wasted hosts, both sustained by a liquid produce by the parent, until grown enough to burst out.
- Dissonant Serenity: After years of living on Belzagor, Seena has become disconcertingly blasé about its alien ecosystem. She has taken to wearing a local jelly-like symbiotic blob creature as an everyday garment, and talks with easy calm about a former friend who died, eventually, from a crystalline parasite that overtook his body."We had to do that for Gio' Salamone, too," Seena said. "He was staying at Fire Point, and went out into the Sea of Dust and got some kind of crystalline parasite into a cut. When Kurtz and Ced Cullen found him, he was all cubes and prisms, outcroppings of the most beautiful iridescent minerals breaking through his skin everywhere. And he was still alive. For a while. Another drink?"
- Extremophile Lifeforms: Some of Belzagor's native life is adapted for life in boiling hot pools. They would freeze to death in regular water, and tends to mutate and evolve quickly due to the strain placed by their home conditions on the DNA molecules in their bodies.
- Fantastic Flora: The flora of Belzagor serves as one of the primary reminders that the story takes place on an alien world, and the narration periodically pauses to describe, often in considerable detail, the various glowing, oddly-colored, strangely-proportioned, mobile, or carnivorous plants, fungi, and slime molds of the planet.
- The plateau lands are covered in much more alien flora than the relatively mundane lowland jungles, such as carpets of carnivorous ground cover, dense growths of spiky purple moss, crimson lichens, and ropy blue fungus.
- In the norther highlands, many trees have luminous foliage, and certain types of fungi move around as crawling, slug-like detritus-eaters.
- At Niagara Station, Seena has grown a large garden of plant life from across the planet, resulting in a surreal mixture of forms. As Gunderson crosses it to reach the station, the narration spends considerable time describing his passage through fleshy candle-like growths, plants with immensely enlarged fruit or stamens, writhing vines, shrubs with mobile leaves, and patches of carnivorous moss and jelly.
- Fantastic Naming Convention: Nildoror names consist of a three- or four-letter syllable, an apostrophe, and a longer section (i.e., Srin'gahar, Vol'himyor, Luu'khamin). Sulidoror names are similar, but with a two-letter starting syllable and a dash (i.e., Na-sinisul, Se-holomir, Yi-gartigok).
- Glowing Flora: The trees of the highland areas have luminous leaves that shed a cold light over the forest during the night. When the nildoror stop to browse there, their faces become covered in glowing lymph. Later, in the caves of the mountain of rebirth, Gunderson finds his way lit by a faintly luminescent green fungus.
- Immortal Procreation Clause: Invoked. The ceremony of rebirth allows the nildoror and sulidoror to live basically forever by periodically transforming into healthy specimens of the other species, and true death is very rare. As a result, they only reproduce sparingly, and to make up for specific losses in the population.
- Intelligent Gerbil: The nildoror are essentially six-tusked, sapient alien elephants with a row of spines running down their backs, and for the most part live the lives of herding grazers. This is an issue for human characters and especially Gunderson, who have trouble thinking of the nildoror as actually being people.
- Literary Allusion Title: The title is from Ecclesiastes 3:21 in the Bible ("Who knows if the spirit of people rises upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth?").
- Man-Eating Plant: A lot of the flora of Belzagor is mobile and carnivorous in some way, including such species as carpets of toothy moss or mobile, noose-like vines.
- Naming Your Colony World: Belzagor was originally known to humanity as Holman's World, implicitly after the first human to find or describe it.
- Resurrective Immortality: The cermony of rebirth allows the nildoror and sulidoror to be transformed into youthful specimens of the other species, stripping away age and injury, and allowing them to effectively live forever.
- The Symbiote:
- In a mutualistic example, sliders are amorphous organisms that live by attaching themselves to large animals, using them as transport in exchange for consuming the sweat and dirt on their skin. When Gunderson meets Seena after the latter has spent several years living alone at the former Niagara station, she has taken to wearing one as a form of clothing.
- Belzagor is also home to a variety of parasites, such as a sponge-like creature that nurtures its larvae inside living animals or a crystalline organism that infects cuts and spreads, fungus-like, itself within its host.
- Telepathy: One of the major reveals in the climax is that the nildoror and sulidoror are in constant species-wide telepathic contact, which is what allows them to share news across their world as quickly as they do.
- Vine Tentacles: The nicalanga vines of Belzagor are mobile and prehensile, and attempt to wind about and strangle prey animals.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Gunderson and Srin'gahar have a conversation on their way to the Mist Country concerning what does or does not make something a person or an animal. Their conversation centers around elephants, which Gunderson argues are not people because their minds are simple, they live nomadically without tools or structures, and never attempted to free themselves from human rule. Srin'gahar replies that the last two things are also true of the nildoror, disagrees that technology is the only proof of intelligence, and as for the first issue, how can Gunderson make claims on the intelligence of elephants when humans have never truly spoken with them?"I yield the point," he said curtly. "Perhaps someday I'll bring an elephant to Belzagor, and let you tell me whether or not it has g'rakh."
"I would greet it as a brother."
"You might be unhappy over the emptiness of your brother's mind," Gunderson said. "You would see a being fashioned in your shape, but you wouldn't succeed in reaching its soul."
"Bring me an elephant, friend of my journey, and I will be the judge of its emptiness," said Srin'gahar.
