The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (7 page)

'Noise
from my subconscious, I suppose. And everybody else in the room ... Listen,
when we found you there in the forest, when I tried to turn you over, you
partly wakened, and I felt a horror of you. I was insane with fear for a
minute. Was that your fear of me I felt?'

'No.'

Her
hand was still on his, and he was quite relaxed, sinking towards sleep, like a
man in pain who has been given relief from pain. 'The forest,' he muttered; she
could barely understand him. 'Afraid.'

She
pressed him no further, but kept her hand on his and watched him go to sleep.
She knew what she felt, and what therefore he must feel. She was confident of
it: there is only one emotion, or state of being, that can thus wholly reverse
itself, polarize, within one moment. In Great Hainish indeed there is one word,
onta,
for
love and for hate. She was not in love with Osden, of course, that was another
kettle of fish. What she felt for him was
onta,
polarized
hate. She held his hand and the current flowed between them, the tremendous
electricity of touch, which he had always dreaded. As he slept the ring of
anatomy-chart muscles around his mouth relaxed, and Tomiko saw on his face what
none of them had ever seen, very faint, a smile. It faded. He slept on.

He
was tough; next day he was sitting up, and hungry. Harfex wished to interrogate
him, but Tomiko put him off. She hung a sheet of polythene over the cubicle
door, as Osden himself had often done. 'Does it actually cut down your empathic
reception?' she asked, and he replied, in the dry, cautious tone they were now
using to each other, 'No.'

'Just
a warning, then.'

'Partly.
More faith-healing. Dr Hammergeld thought it worked ... Maybe it does, a
little.'

There
had been love, once. A terrified child, suffocating in the tidal rush and
battering of the huge emotions of adults, a drowning child, saved by one man.
Taught to breathe, to live, by one man. Given everything, all protection and
love, by one man. Father/Mother/God: no other. 'Is he still alive? Tomiko
asked, thinking of Osden's incredible loneliness, and the strange cruelty of
the great doctors. She was shocked when she heard his forced, tinny laugh. 'He
died at least two and a half centuries ago,' Osden said. 'Do you forget where
we are, Coordinator? We've all left our little families behind...'

Outside
the polythene curtain the eight other human beings on World 4470 moved vaguely.
Their voices were low and strained. Eskwana slept; Poswet To was in therapy;
Jenny Chong was trying to rig lights in her cubicle so that she wouldn't cast a
shadow.

'They're
all scared,' Tomiko said, scared. 'They've all got these ideas about what
attacked you. A sort of ape-potato, a giant fanged spinach, I don't know...
Even Harfex. You may be right not to force them to see. That would be worse, to
lose confidence in one another. But why are we all so shaky, unable to face the
fact, going to pieces so easily? Are we really all insane?'

'We'll
soon be more so.'

'Why?'

'There
is
something.'
He closed his mouth, the muscles of his lips stood out rigid. 'Something
sentient?'

'A
sentience.'

'In
the forest?' He nodded. 'What is it, then—?'

'The
fear.' He began to look strained again, and moved restlessly. 'When I fell,
there, you know, I didn't lose consciousness at once. Or I kept regaining it. I
don't know. It was more like being paralyzed.'

'You
were.'

'I
was on the ground. I couldn't get up. My face was in the dirt, in that soft
leaf mold. It was in my nostrils and eyes. I couldn't move. Couldn't see. As if
I was in the ground. Sunk into it, part of it. I knew I was between two trees
even though I never saw them. I suppose I could feel the roots. Below me in the
ground, down under the ground. My hands were bloody, I could feel that, and the
blood made the dirt around my face sticky. I felt the fear. It kept growing. As
if they'd finally
known
I was there, lying on them there,
under them, among them, the thing they feared, and yet part of their fear
itself. I couldn't stop sending the fear back, and it kept growing, and I
couldn't move, I couldn't get away. I would pass out, I think, and then the
fear would bring me to again, and I still couldn't move. Any more than they
can.'

Tomiko
felt the cold stirring of her hair, the readying of the apparatus of terror.
'They: who are they, Osden?'

'They,
it - I don't know. The fear.'

'What
is he talking about?' Harfex demanded when Tomiko reported this conversation.
She would not let Harfex question Osden yet, feeling that she must protect
Osden from the onslaught of the Hainishman's powerful, over-repressed emotions.
Unfortunately this fueled the slow fire of paranoid anxiety that burned in poor
Harfex, and he thought she and Osden were in league, hiding some fact of great
importance or peril from the rest of the team.

'It's
like the blind man trying to describe the elephant. Osden hasn't seen or heard
the ... the sentience, any more than we have.'

'But
he's felt it, my dear Haito,' Harfex said with just-suppressed rage. 'Not
empathically. On his skull. It came and knocked him down and beat him with a
blunt instrument. Did he not catch
one
glimpse of
it?'

'What
would he have seen, Harfex?' Tomiko asked, but he would not hear her meaningful
tone; even he had blocked out that comprehension. What one fears is alien. The
murderer is an outsider, a foreigner, not one of us. The evil is not in me!

'The
first blow knocked him pretty well out,' Tomiko said a little wearily, 'he
didn't see anything. But when he came to again, alone in the forest, he felt a
great fear. Not his own fear, an empathic effect. He is certain of that. And
certain it was nothing picked up from any of us. So that evidently the native
life-forms are not all insentient.'

Harfex
looked at her a moment, grim. 'You're trying to frighten me, Haito. I do not
understand your motives.' He got up and went off to his laboratory table,
walking slowly and stiffly, like a man of eighty not of forty.

She
looked round at the others. She felt some desperation. Her new, fragile, and
profound interdependence with Osden gave her, she was well aware, some added
strength. But if even Harfex could not keep his head, who of the others would?
Porlock and Eskwana were shut in their cubicles, the others were all working or
busy with something. There was something queer about their positions. For a
while the Coordinator could not tell what it was, then she saw that they were
all sitting facing the nearby forest. Playing chess with Asnanifoil, Olleroo
had edged her chair around until it was almost beside his.

She
went to Mannon, who was dissecting a tangle of spidery brown roots, and told
him to look for the pattern-puzzle. He saw it at once, and said with unusual
brevity, 'Keeping an eye on the enemy.'

'What
enemy? What do
you
feel, Mannon?' She had a sudden hope
in him as a psychologist, on this obscure ground of hints and empathies where
biologists went astray.

'I
feel a strong anxiety with a specific spatial orientation. But I am not an
empath. Therefore the anxiety is explicable in terms of the particular stress-situation,
that is, the attack on a team member in the forest, and also in terms of the
total stress-situation, that is, my presence in a totally alien environment,
for which the archetypical connotations of the word "forest" provide
an inevitable metaphor.'

Hours
later Tomiko woke to hear Osden screaming in nightmare; Mannon was calming him,
and she sank back into her own dark-branching pathless dreams. In the morning
Eskwana did not wake. He could not be roused with stimulant drugs. He clung to
his sleep, slipping farther and farther back, mumbling softly now and then
until, wholly regressed, he lay curled on his side, thumb at his lips, gone.

'Two
days; two down. Ten little Indians, nine little Indians ...' That was Porlock.

'And
you're the next little Indian,' Jenny Chong snapped. 'Go analyze your urine,
Porlock!'

'He
is driving us all insane,' Porlock said, getting up and waving his left arm.
'Can't you feel it? For God's sake, are you all deaf and blind? Can't you feel
what he's doing, the emanations? It all comes from him - from his room there -
from his mind. He is driving us all insane with fear!'

'Who
is?' said Asnanifoil, looming precipitous and hairy over the little Terran.

'Do
I have to say his name? Osden, then. Osden! Osden! Why do you think I tried to
kill him? In self-defense! To save all of us! Because you won't see what he's
doing to us. He's sabotaged the mission by making us quarrel, and now he's
going to drive us all insane by projecting fear at us so that we can't sleep or
think, like a huge radio that doesn't make any sound, but it broadcasts all the
time, and you can't sleep, and you can't think. Haito and Harfex are already
under his control but the rest of you can be saved. I had to do it!'

'You
didn't do it very well,' Osden said, standing half-naked, all rib and bandage,
at the door of his cubicle. 'I could have hit myself harder. Hell, it isn't me
that's scaring you blind, Porlock, it's out there - there, in the woods!'

Porlock
made an ineffectual attempt to assault Osden; Asnanifoil held him back, and
continued to hold him effortlessly while Mannon gave him a sedative shot. He
was put away shouting about giant radios. In a minute the sedative took effect,
and he joined a peaceful silence to Eskwana's.

'All
right,' said Harfex. 'Now, Osden, you'll tell us what you know and all you
know.'

Osden
said, 'I don't know anything.'

He
looked battered and faint. Tomiko made him sit down before he talked.

'After
I'd been three days in the forest, I thought I was occasionally receiving some
kind of affect.'

'Why
didn't you report it?'

'Thought
I was going spla, like the rest of you.'

That,
equally, should have been reported.'

'You'd
have called me back to base. I couldn't take it. You realize that my inclusion
in the mission was a bad mistake. I'm not able to coexist with nine other
neurotic personalities at close quarters. I was wrong to volunteer for Extreme
Survey, and the Authority was wrong to accept me.'

No
one spoke; but Tomiko saw, with certainty this time, the flinch in Osden's
shoulders and the tightening of his facial muscles, as he registered their
bitter agreement.

'Anyhow,
I didn't want to come back to base because I was curious. Even going psycho,
how could I pick up empathic affects when there was no creature to emit them?
They weren't bad, then. Very vague. Queer. Like a draft in a closed room,
a
flicker
in the corner of your eye. Nothing really.'

For
a moment he had been borne up on their listening; they heard, so he spoke. He
was wholly at their mercy. If they disliked him he had to be hateful; if they
mocked him he became grotesque; if they listened to him he was the storyteller.
He was helplessly obedient to the demands of their emotions, reactions, moods.
And there were seven of them, too many to cope with, so that he must be
constantly knocked about from one to another's whim. He could not find
coherence. Even as he spoke and held them, somebody's attention would wander:
Olleroo perhaps was thinking that he wasn't unattractive, Harfex was seeking
the ulterior motive of his words, Asnanifoil's mind, which could not be long
held by the concrete, was roaming off towards the eternal peace of number, and
Tomiko was distracted by pity, by fear. Osden's voice faltered. He lost the
thread. 'I ... I thought it must be the trees,' he said, and stopped.

'It's
not the trees,' Harfex said. 'They have no more nervous system than do plants
of the Hainish Descent on Earth. None.'

'You're
not seeing the forest for the trees, as they say on Earth,' Mannon put in,
smiling elfinly; Harfex stared at him. 'What about those root-nodes we've been
puzzling about for twenty days - eh?'

'What
about them?'

'They
are, indubitably, connections. Connections among the trees. Right? Now let's
just suppose, most improbably, that you knew nothing of animal brain-structure.
And you were given one axon, or one detached glial cell, to examine. Would you
be likely to discover what it was? Would you see that the cell was capable of
sentience?'