The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (4 page)

Our
vegetable love should grow

Vaster
than empires, and more slow...

Like
'Nine Lives' this is not a psychomyth but a regular science fiction story,
developed not for action/adventure, but psychologically. Unless physical action
reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored
with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less
happens. Obviously my interest is in what goes on inside. Inner space and all
that. We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of
us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

Hidden
in the foliage here is a tiny act of homage. The protagonist of 'He Who Shapes'
by Roger Zelazny, one of the finest science fiction stories I know, is called
Charles Render. I christened a syndrome after him.

It
was only during the earliest decades of the League that the Earth sent ships
out on the enormously long voyages, beyond the pale, over the stars and far
away. They were seeking for worlds which had not been seeded or settled by the
Founders on Hain, truly alien worlds. All the Known Worlds went back to the
Hainish Origin, and the Terrans, having been not only founded but salvaged by
the Hainish, resented this. They wanted to get away from the family. They
wanted to find somebody new. The Hainish, like tiresomely understanding
parents, supported their explorations, and contributed ships and volunteers, as
did several other worlds of the League.

All
these volunteers to the Extreme Survey crews shared one peculiarity: they were
of unsound mind.

What
sane person, after all, would go out to collect information that would not be
received for five or ten centuries? Cosmic mass interference had not yet been
eliminated from the operation of the ansible, and so instantaneous
communication was reliable only within a range of 120 lightyears. The explorers
would be quite isolated. And of course they had no idea what they might come
back to, if they came back. No normal human being who had experienced
time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds would volunteer for a
round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts.

Ten
of them climbed aboard the ferry at Smeming Port, and made varyingly inept
attempts to get to know one another during the three days the ferry took
getting to their ship,
Gum.
Gum is a
Cetian nickname, on the order of Baby or Pet. There were two Cetians on the
team, two Hainishmen, one Beldene, and five Terrans; the Cetian-built ship was chartered
by the Government of Earth. Her motley crew came aboard wriggling through the
coupling tube one by one like apprehensive spermatozoa trying to fertilize the
universe. The ferry left, and the navigator put
Gum
underway.
She flittered for some hours on the edge of space a few hundred million miles
from Smeming Port, and then abruptly vanished.

When,
after 10 hours 29 minutes, or 256 years,
Gum
reappeared
in normal space, she was supposed to be in the vicinity of Star KG-E-96651.
Sure enough, there was the gold pinhead of the star. Somewhere within a
four-hundred-million-kilometer sphere there was also a greenish planet, World
4470, as charted by a Cetian mapmaker. The ship now had to find the planet.
This was not quite so easy as it might sound, given a
four-hundred-million-kilometer haystack. And
Gum
couldn't bat
about in planetary space at near lightspeed; if she did, she and Star
KG-E-96651 and World 4470 might all end up going bang. She had to creep, using
rocket propulsion, at a few hundred thousand miles an hour. The Mathematician/Navigator,
Asnanifoil, knew pretty well where the planet ought to be, and thought they
might raise it within ten E-days. Meanwhile the members of the Survey team got
to know one another still better.

'I
can't stand him,' said Porlock, the Hard Scientist (chemistry, plus physics,
astronomy, geology, etc.), and little blobs of spittle appeared on his
mustache. 'The man is insane. I can't imagine why he was passed as fit to join
a Survey team, unless this is a deliberate experiment in noncompatibility,
planned by the Authority, with us as guinea pigs.'

'We
generally use hamsters and Hainish gholes,' said Mannon, the Soft Scientist
(psychology, plus psychiatry, anthropology, ecology, etc.), politely; he was
one of the Hainishmen. 'Instead of guinea pigs. Well, you know, Mr Osden is
really a very rare case. In fact, he's the first fully cured case of Render's
Syndrome - a variety of infantile autism which was thought to be incurable. The
great Terran analyst Hammergeld reasoned that the cause of the autistic
condition in this case is a supernormal empathic capacity, and developed an
appropriate treatment. Mr Osden is the first patient to undergo that treatment,
in fact he lived with Dr Hammergeld until he was eighteen. The therapy was
completely successful.'

'Successful?'

'Why,
yes. He certainly is not autistic.'

'No,
he's intolerable!'

'Well,
you see,' said Mannon, gazing mildly at the saliva-flecks on Porlock's
mustache, 'the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting -
let's say you and Mr Osden just for example - is something you're scarcely
aware of; habit, manners, inattention get you past it; you've learned to ignore
it, to the point where you might even deny it exists. However, Mr Osden, being an
empath, feels it. Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which
is which. Let's say that there's a normal element of hostility towards any
stranger in your emotional reaction to him when you meet him, plus a
spontaneous dislike of his looks, or clothes, or handshake - it doesn't matter
what. He feels that dislike. As his autistic defense has been unlearned, he
resorts to an aggressive-defense mechanism, a response in kind to the
aggression which you have unwittingly projected onto him.' Mannon went on for
quite a long time.

'Nothing
gives a man the right to be such a bastard,' Porlock said.

'He
can't tune us out?' asked Harfex, the Biologist, another Hainishman.

'It's
like hearing,' said Olleroo, Assistant Hard Scientist, stooping over to paint
her toenails with fluorescent lacquer. 'No eyelids on your ears. No Off switch
on empathy. He hears our feelings whether he wants to or not.'

'Does
he know what we're
thinking?'
asked
Eskwana, the Engineer, looking round at the others in real dread.

'No,'
Porlock snapped. 'Empathy's not telepathy! Nobody's got telepathy.'

'Yet,'
said Mannon, with his little smile. 'Just before I left Hain there was a most
interesting report in from one of the recently rediscovered worlds, a hilfer
named Rocannon reporting what appears to be a teachable telepathic technique
existent among a mutated hominid race; I only saw a synopsis in the HILF
Bulletin, but—' He went on. The others had learned that they could talk while
Mannon went on talking; he did not seem to mind, nor even to miss much of what
they said,

'Then
why does he hate us?' Eskwana said.

'Nobody
hates you, Ander honey,' said Olleroo, daubing Eskwana's left thumbnail with
fluorescent pink. The engineer flushed and smiled vaguely.

'He
acts as if he hated us,' said Haito, the Coordinator. She was a
delicate-looking woman of pure Asian descent, with a surprising voice, husky,
deep, and soft, like a young bullfrog. 'Why, if he suffers from our hostility,
does he increase it by constant attacks and insults? I can't say I think much
of Dr Hammergeld's cure, really, Mannon; autism might be preferable

She
stopped. Osden had come into the main cabin.

He
looked flayed. His skin was unnaturally white and thin, showing the channels of
his blood like a faded road map in red and blue. His Adam's apple, the muscles
that circled his mouth, the bones and ligaments of his wrists and hands, all
stood out distinctly as if displayed for an anatomy lesson. His hair was pale
rust, like long-dried blood. He had eyebrows and lashes, but they were visible
only in certain lights; what one saw was the bones of the eye sockets, the
veining of the lids, and the colorless eyes. They were not red eyes, for he was
not really an albino, but they were not blue or grey; colors had cancelled out
in Osden's eyes, leaving a cold water-like clarity, infinitely penetrable. He
never looked directly at one. His face lacked expression, like an anatomical
drawing, or a skinned face.

'I
agree,' he said in a high, harsh tenor, 'that even autistic withdrawal might be
preferable to the smog of cheap secondhand emotions with which you people
surround me. What are you sweating hate for now, Porlock? Can't stand the sight
of me? Go practice some auto-eroticism the way you were doing last night, it
improves your vibes. Who the devil moved my tapes, here? Don't touch my things,
any of you. I won't have it.'

'Osden,'
said Asnanifoil in his large slow voice, 'why
are
you such a
bastard?'

Ander
Eskwana cowered and put his hands in front of his face. Contention frightened
him. Olleroo looked up with a vacant yet eager expression, the eternal
spectator.

'Why
shouldn't I be?' said Osden. He was not looking at

Asnanifoil,
and was keeping physically as far away from all of them as he could in the
crowded cabin. 'None of you constitute, in yourselves, any reason for my
changing my behavior.'

Harfex,
a reserved and patient man, said, 'The reason is that we shall be spending
several years together. Life will be better for all of us if—'

'Can't
you understand that I don't give a damn for all of you?' Osden said, took up
his microtapes, and went out. Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil
was drawing slipstreams in the air with his finger and muttering the Ritual
Primes. 'You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on the
part of the Terran Authority. I saw this almost at once. This mission is meant
to fail,' Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder.
Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. 'I did
tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.'

All
the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their
fellow team members intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally
sympathetic. They had to work together in close quarters and nasty places, and
could expect one another's paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias and
compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least
most of the time. Osden might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and
his personality was disastrous. He had been sent only on account of his
singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range bioempathic
receptivity. His talent wasn't species-specific; he could pick up emotion or
sentience from anything that felt. He could share lust with a white rat, pain
with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy with a moth. On an alien world, the
Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything nearby is
sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden's tide was a new
one: he was the team's Sensor.

'What
is emotion, Osden?' Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to
make some rapport with him for once. 'What is it, exactly, that you pick up
with your empathic sensitivity?'

'Muck,'
the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. 'The psychic excreta of the
animal kingdom. I wade through your faeces.'

'I
was trying,' she said, 'to learn some facts.' She thought her tone was
admirably calm.

'You
weren't after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some
curiosity, and a great deal of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog, to
see the maggots crawl. Will you understand once and for all that I don't want
to be got at, that I want to be left alone?' His skin was mottled with red and
violet, his voice had risen. 'Go roll in your own dung, you yellow bitch!' he
shouted at her silence.

'Calm
down,' she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin.
Of course he had been right about her motives; her question had been largely a
pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But what harm in that? Did not that
effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question she
had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him,
the poor arrogant venomous bastard, Mr No-skin as Olleroo called him. What did
he expect, the way he acted? Love?

'I
guess he can't stand anybody feeling sorry for him,' said Olleroo, lying on the
lower bunk, gilding her nipples.