The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (6 page)

'Sit
down, Porlock. Take it easy. Now wait, go through this again. You
saw
something—'

'Not
clearly. Just the movement. Purposive. A - an -I
don't
know what it could have been. Something self-moving. In the trees, the
arboriformes, whatever you call 'em. At the edge of the woods.'

Harfex
looked grim. 'There is nothing here that could attack you, Porlock. There are
not even microzoa. There
could not
be
a
large
animal.'

'Could
you possibly have seen an epiphyte drop suddenly,
a
vine
come loose behind you?'

'No',
Porlock said. 'It was coming down at me, through the branches, fast. When I
turned it took off again, away and upward. It made
a
noise,
a sort of crashing. If it wasn't an animal, God knows what it could have been!
It was big - as big as a man, at least. Maybe a reddish color. I couldn't see,
I'm not sure.'

'It
was Osden,' said Jenny Chong, 'doing a Tarzan act.' She giggled nervously, and
Tomiko repressed a wild feckless laugh. But Harfex was not smiling.

'One
gets uneasy under the arboriformes,' he said in his polite, repressed voice.
'I've noticed that. Indeed that may be why I've put off working in the forests.
There's a hypnotic quality in the colors and spacing of the stems and branches,
especially the helically-arranged ones; and the spore-throwers grow so
regularly spaced that it seems unnatural. I find it quite disagreeable,
subjectively speaking. I wonder if a stronger effect of that sort mightn't have
produced a hallucination...?'

Porlock
shook his head. He wet his lips. 'It was there,' he said. 'Something. Moving
with purpose. Trying to attack me from behind.'

When
Osden called in, punctual as always, at 24 o'clock that night, Harfex told him
Porlock's report. 'Have you come on anything at all, Mr Osden, that could
substantiate Mr Porlock's impression of a motile, sentient life-form, in the
forest?'

Ssss,
the
radio said sardonically. 'No. Bullshit,' said Osden's unpleasant voice.

'You've
been actually inside the forest longer than any of us,' Harfex said with
unmitigable politeness. 'Do you agree with my impression that the forest
ambiance has a rather troubling and possibly hallucinogenic effect on the
perceptions?'

Ssss.
'I'll
agree that Porlock's perceptions are easily troubled. Keep him in his lab,
he'll do less harm. Anything else?'

'Not
at present,' Harfex said, and Osden cut off.

Nobody
could credit Porlock's story, and nobody could discredit it. He was positive
that something, something big, had tried to attack him by surprise. It was hard
to deny this, for they were on an alien world, and everyone who had entered the
forest had felt a certain chill and foreboding under the 'trees.' ('Call them
trees, certainly,' Harfex had said. 'They really are the same thing, only, of
course, altogether different.') They agreed that they had felt uneasy, or had
had the sense that something was watching them from behind.

'We've
got to clear this up,' Porlock said, and he asked to be sent as a temporary
Biologist's Aide, like Osden, into the forest to explore and observe. Olleroo
and Jenny Chong volunteered if they could go as a pair. Harfex sent them all
off into the forest near which they were encamped, a vast tract covering
four-fifths of Continent D. He forbade side-arms. They were not to go outside a
fifty-mile half-circle, which included Osden's current site. They all reported
in twice daily, for three days. Porlock reported a glimpse of what seemed to be
a large semi-erect shape moving through the trees across the river; Olleroo was
sure she had heard something moving near the tent, the second night.

'There
are no animals on this planet,' Harfex said, dogged.

Then
Osden missed his morning call.

Tomiko
waited less than an hour, then flew with Harfex to the area where Osden had
reported himself the night before. But as the helijet hovered over the sea of
purplish leaves, illimitable, impenetrable, she felt a panic despair. 'How can
we find him in this?'

'He
reported landing on the riverbank. Find the aircar; he'll he camped near it,
and he can't have gone far from his camp. Species-counting is slow work.
There's the river.'

There's
his car,' Tomiko said, catching the bright foreign glint among the vegetable
colors and shadows. 'Here goes, then.'

She
put the ship in hover and pitched out the ladder. She and Harfex descended. The
sea of life closed over their heads.

As
her feet touched the forest floor, she unsnapped the flap of her holster; then glancing
at Harfex, who was unarmed, she left the gun untouched. But her hand kept
coming back up to it. There was no sound at all, as soon as they were a few
meters away from the slow, brown river, and the light was dim. Great boles
stood well apart, almost regularly, almost alike; they were soft-skinned, some
appearing smooth and others spongy, grey or greenish-brown or brown, twined
with cable-like creepers and festooned with epiphytes, extending rigid,
entangled armfuls of big, saucer-shaped, dark leaves that formed a roof-layer
twenty to thirty meters thick. The ground underfoot was springy as a mattress,
every inch of it knotted with roots and peppered with small, fleshy-leaved
growths.

'Here's
his tent,' Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community
of the voiceless. In the tent was Osden's sleeping bag, a couple of books, a
box of rations. We should be calling, shouting for him, she thought, but did
not even suggest it; nor did Harfex. They circled out from the tent, careful to
keep each other in sight through the thick-standing presences, the crowding
gloom. She stumbled over Osden's body, not thirty meters from the tent, led to
it by the whitish gleam of a dropped notebook. He lay face down between two
huge-rooted trees. His head and hands were covered with blood, some dried, some
still oozing red.

Harfex
appeared beside her, his pale Hainish complexion quite green in the dusk.
'Dead?'

'No.
He's been struck. Beaten. From behind.' Tomiko's fingers felt over the bloody
skull and temples and nape. 'A weapon or a tool... I don't find a fracture.'

As
she turned Osden's body over so they could lift him, his eyes opened. She was
holding him, bending close to his face.

His
pale lips writhed. A deathly fear came into her. She screamed aloud two or
three times and tried to run away, shambling and stumbling into the terrible
dusk. Harfex caught her, and at his touch and the sound of his voice, her panic
decreased. 'What is it? What is it?' he was saying.

'I
don't know,' she sobbed. Her heartbeat still shook her, and she could not see
clearly. 'The fear - the ... I panicked. When I saw his eyes.'

'We're
both nervous. I don't understand this—'

'I'm
all right now, come on, we've got to get him under care.'

Both
working with senseless haste, they lugged Osden to the riverside and hauled him
up on a rope under his armpits; he dangled like a sack, twisting a little over
the glutinous dark sea of leaves. They pulled him into the helijet and took
off. Within a minute they were over open prairie. Tomiko locked onto the homing
beam. She drew a deep breath, and her eyes met Harfex's.

'I
was so terrified I almost fainted. I have never done that.'

'I
was ... unreasonably frightened also,' said the Hainishman, and indeed he
looked aged and shaken. 'Not so badly as you. But as unreasonably.'

'It
was when I was in contact with him, holding him. He seemed to be conscious for
a moment.'

'Empathy?
... I hope he can tell us what attacked him.'

Osden,
like a broken dummy covered with blood and mud, half lay as they had bundled
him into the rear seats in their frantic urgency to get out of the forest.

More
panic met their arrival at base. The ineffective brutality of the assault was
sinister and bewildering. Since Harfex stubbornly denied any possibility of
animal life they began speculating about sentient plants, vegetable monsters,
psychic Projections. Jenny Chong's latent phobia reasserted itself and she
could talk about nothing except the Dark Egos which followed people around
behind their backs. She and O
lleroo
Porlock had
been summoned back to base; and nobody was much inclined to go outside.

Osden
had lost a good deal of blood during the three or four hours he had lain alone,
and concussion and severe contusions had put him in shock and semi-coma. As he
came out of this and began running a low fever he called several times for
'Doctor', in a plaintive voice: 'Doctor Hammergeld ...' When he regained full
consciousness, two of those long days later, Tomiko called Harfex into his
cubicle.

'Osden:
can you tell us what attacked you?'

The
pale eyes flickered past Harfex's face.

'You
were attacked,' Tomiko said gently. The shifty gaze was hatefully familiar, but
she was a physician, protective of the hurt. 'You may not remember it yet.
Something attacked you. You were in the forest—'

'Ah!'
he cried out, his eyes growing bright and his features contorting. 'The forest
- in the forest—'

'What's
in the forest?'

He
gasped for breath. A look of clearer consciousness came into his face. After a
while he said, 'I don't know.'

'Did
you see what attacked you?' Harfex asked. 'I don't know.'

'You
remember it now.'

'I
don't know.'

'All
our lives may depend on this. You must tell us what you saw!'

'I
don't know,' Osden said, sobbing with weakness. He was too weak to hide the
fact that he was hiding the answer, yet he would not say it. Porlock, nearby,
was chewing his pepper-colored mustache as he tried to hear what was going on
in the cubicle. Harfex leaned over Osden and said, 'You
will
tell us—'
Tomiko had to interfere bodily.

Harfex
controlled himself with an effort that was painful to see. He went off silently
to his cubicle, where no doubt he took a double or triple dose of
tranquillizers. The other men and women, scattered about the big frail
building, a long main hall and ten sleeping-cubicles, said nothing, but looked
depressed and edgy. Osden, as always, even now, had them all at his mercy.
Tomiko looked down at him with a rush of hatred that burned in her throat like
bile. This monstrous egotism that fed itself on others' emotion, this absolute
selfishness, was worse than any hideous deformity of the flesh. Like a
congenital monster, he should not have lived. Should not be alive. Should have
died. Why had his head not been split open?

As
he lay flat and white, his hands helpless at his sides, his colorless eyes were
wide open, and there were tears running from the corners. He tried to flinch
away. 'Don't,' he said in
a
weak hoarse
voice, and tried to raise his hands to protect his head. 'Don't!'

She
sat down on the folding-stool beside the cot, and after
a
while
put her hand on his. He tried to pull away, but lacked the strength.

A
long silence fell between them.

'Osden,'
she murmured, 'I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I will you well. Let me will you
well, Osden. I don't want to hurt you. Listen, I do see now. It was one of us.
That's right, isn't it. No, don't answer, only tell me if I'm wrong; but I'm
not ... Of course there are animals on this planet. Ten of them. I don't care
who it was. It doesn't matter, does it. It could have been me, just now. I
realize that. I didn't understand how it is, Osden. You can't see how difficult
it is for us to understand... But listen. If it were love, instead of hate and
fear ... Is it never love?'

'No.'

'Why
not? Why should it never be? Are human beings all so Weak? That is terrible.
Never mind, never mind, don't worry. Keep still. At least right now it isn't
hate, is it? Sympathy at least, concern, well-wishing. You do feel that. Osden?
Is it what you feel?'

'Among...
other things,' he said, almost inaudibly.