The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (8 page)

'No.
Because it isn't. A single cell is capable of mechanical response to stimulus.
No more. Are you hypothesizing that individual arboriformes are
"cells" in a kind of brain, Mannon?'

'Not
exactly. I'm merely pointing out that they are all interconnected, both by the
root-node linkage and by your green epiphytes in the branches. A linkage of
incredible complexity and physical extent. Why, even the prairie grass-forms
have those root-connectors, don't they? I know that sentience or intelligence
isn't a thing, you can't find it in, or analyze it out from, the cells of a
brain. It's a function of the connected cells. It is, in a sense, the
connection: the connectedness. It doesn't exist. I'm not trying to say it
exists. I'm only guessing that Osden might be able to describe it.'

And
Osden took him up, speaking as if in trance. 'Sentience without senses. Blind,
deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to
sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing
comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness of being,
without object or subject. Nirvana.'

'Then
why do you receive fear?' Tomiko asked in a low voice.

'I
don't know. I can't see how awareness of objects, of others, could arise: an
unperceiving response ... But there was an uneasiness, for days. And then when
I lay between the two trees and my blood was on their roots—' Osden's face
glittered with sweat. 'It became fear,' he said shrilly, 'only fear.'

'If
such a function existed,' Harfex said, 'it would not be capable of conceiving
of a self-moving, material entity, or responding to one. It could no more
become aware of us than we can "become aware" of Infinity.'

'
"The silence of those infinite expanses terrifies me",' muttered
Tomiko. 'Pascal was aware of Infinity. By way of fear.'

'To
a forest,' Mannon said, 'we might appear as forest fires. Hurricanes. Dangers.
What moves quickly is dangerous, to a plant. The rootless would be alien,
terrible. And if it is mind, it seems only too probable that it might become
aware of Osden, whose own mind is open to connection with all others so long as
he's conscious, and who was lying in pain and afraid within it, actually inside
it. No wonder it was afraid—'

'Not
"it",' Harfex said. 'There is no being, no huge creature, no person!
There could at most be only a function—'

'There
is only a fear,' Osden said.

They
were all still a while, and heard the stillness outside.

'Is
that what I feel all the time coming up behind me?' Jenny Chong asked, subdued.

Osden
nodded. 'You all feel it, deaf as you are. Eskwana's the worst off, because he
actually has some empathic capacity. He could send if he learned how, but he's
too weak, never will be anything but a medium.'

'Listen,
Osden,' Tomiko said, 'you can send. Then send to it - the forest, the fear out
there - tell it that we won't hurt it. Since it has, or is, some sort of affect
that translates into what we feel as emotion, can't you translate back? Send
out a message, We are harmless, we are friendly.'

'You
must know that nobody can emit a false empathic message, Haito. You can't send
something that doesn't exist.'

'But
we don't intend harm, we are friendly.'

'Are
we? In the forest, when you picked me up, did you feel friendly?'

'No.
Terrified. But that's - it, the forest, the plants, not my own fear, isn't it?'

'What's
the difference? It's all you felt. Can't you see,' and Osden's voice rose in
exasperation, 'why I dislike you and you dislike me, all of you? Can't you see
that I retransmit every negative or aggressive affect you've felt towards me
since we first met? I return your hostility, with thanks. I do it in
self-defense. Like Porlock. It is self-defense, though; it's the only technique
I developed to replace my original defense of total withdrawal from others.
Unfortunately it creates a closed circuit, self-sustaining and
self-reinforcing. Your initial reaction to me was the instinctive antipathy to
a cripple; by now of course it's hatred. Can you fail to see my point? The
forest-mind out there transmits only terror, now, and the only message I can
send it is terror, because when exposed to it I can feel nothing except
terror!'

'What
must we do, then?' said Tomiko, and Mannon replied promptly, 'Move camp. To
another continent. If there are plant-minds there, they'll be slow to notice
us, as this one was; maybe they won't notice us at all.'

'It
would be a considerable relief,' Osden observed stiffly. The others had been
watching him with a new curiosity. He had revealed himself, they had seen him
as he was, a helpless man in a trap. Perhaps, like Tomiko, they had seen that
the trap itself, his crass and cruel egotism, was their own construction, not
his. They had built the cage and locked him in it, and like a caged ape he
threw filth out through the bars. If, meeting him, they had offered trust, if
they had been strong enough to offer him love, how might he have appeared to
them?

None
of them could have done so, and it was too late now. Given time, given
solitude, Tomiko might have built up with him a slow resonance of feeling, a
consonance of trust, a harmony; but there was no time, their job must be done.
There was not room enough for the cultivation of so great a thing, and they
must make do with sympathy, with pity, the small change of love. Even that much
had given her strength, but it was nowhere near enough for him. She could see
in his flayed face now his savage resentment of their curiosity, even of her
pity.

'Go
lie down, that gash is bleeding again,' she said, and he obeyed her.

Next
morning they packed up, melted down the sprayform hangar and living quarters,
lifted
Gum
on
mechanical drive and took her halfway round World 4470, over the red and green
lands, the many warm green seas. They had picked out a likely spot on Continent
G: a prairie, twenty thousand square kilos of windswept graminiformes. No
forest was within a hundred kilos of the site, and there were no lone trees or
groves on the plain. The plant-forms occurred only in large species-colonies,
never intermingled, except for certain tiny ubiquitous saprophytes and
spore-bearers. The team sprayed holomeld over structure forms, and by evening
of the thirty-two-hour day were settled in to the new camp. Eskwana was still
asleep and Porlock still sedated, but everyone else was cheerful. 'You can
breathe here!' they kept saying.

Osden
got on his feet and went shakily to the doorway; leaning there he looked
through twilight over the dim reaches of the swaying grass that was not grass.
There was a faint, sweet odor of pollen on the wind; no sound but the soft,
vast sibilance of wind. His bandaged head cocked a little, the empath stood
motionless for a long time. Darkness came, and the stars, lights in the windows
of the distant house of Man. The wind had ceased, there was no sound. He
listened.

In
the long night Haito Tomiko listened. She lay still and heard the blood in her
arteries, the breathing of sleepers, the wind blowing, the dark veins running,
the dreams advancing, the vast static of stars increasing as the universe died
slowly, the sound of death walking. She struggled out of her bed, fled the tiny
solitude of her cubicle. Eskwana alone slept. Porlock lay straitjacketed,
raving softly in his obscure native tongue. Olleroo and Jenny Chong were
playing cards, grim-faced. Poswet To was in the therapy niche, plugged in.
Asnanifoil was drawing a mandala, the Third Pattern of the Primes. Mannon and
Harfex were sitting up with Osden.

She
changed the bandages on Osden's head. His lank, reddish hair, where she had not
had to shave it, looked strange. It was salted with white, now. Her hands shook
as she worked.

Nobody
had yet said anything.

'How
can the fear be here too?' she said, and her voice rang flat and false in the
terrific silence.

'It's
not just the trees; the grasses too...'

'But
we're twelve thousand kilos from where we were this morning, we left it on the
other side of the planet.'

'It's
all one,' Osden said. 'One big green thought. How long does it take a thought
to get from one side of your brain to the other?'

'It
doesn't think. It isn't thinking,' Harfex said, lifelessly. 'It's merely a
network of processes. The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those
nodal junctures between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting
electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly
speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windborne
sentience, connecting overseas. But it is not conceivable. That all the
biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive,
irrational, immortal, isolated...'

'Isolated',
said Osden. 'That's it! That's the fear. It isn't that we're motile, or
destructive. It's just that we are. We are other. There has never been any
other.'

'You're
right,' Mannon said, almost whispering. 'It has no peers. No enemies. No
relationship with anything but itself. One alone forever.'

'Then
what's the function of its intelligence in species-survival?'

'None,
maybe,' Osden said. 'Why are you getting teleological, Harfex? Aren't you a
Hainishman? Isn't the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?'

Harfex
did not take the bait. He looked ill. 'We should leave this world,' he said.

'Now
you know why I always want to get out, get away from you,' Osden said with a
kind of morbid geniality. 'It isn't pleasant, is it - the other's fear...? If
only it were an animal intelligence. I can get through to animals. I get along
with cobras and tigers; superior intelligence gives one the advantage. I should
have been used in a zoo, not on a human team ... If I could get through to the
damned stupid potato! If it wasn't so overwhelming ... I still pick up more
than the fear, you know. And before it panicked it had a - there was a
serenity. I couldn't take it in, then, I didn't realize how big it was. To know
the whole daylight, after all, and the whole night. All the winds and lulls
together. The winter stars and the summer stars at the same time. To have
roots, and no enemies. To be entire. Do you see? No invasion. No others. To be
whole...'

He
had never spoken before, Tomiko thought.

'You
are defenseless against it, Osden,' she said. 'Your personality has changed
already. You're vulnerable to it. We may not all go mad, but you will, if we
don't leave.'

He
hesitated, then he looked up at Tomiko, the first time he had ever met her
eyes, a long, still look, clear as water.

'What's
sanity ever done for me?' he said, mocking. 'But you have a point, Haito. You
have something there.'

'We
should get away,' Harfex muttered.

'If
I gave in to it,' Osden mused, 'could I communicate?'

'By
"give in",' Mannon said in a rapid, nervous voice, 'I assume that you
mean, stop sending back the empathic information which you receive from the
plant-entity: stop rejecting the fear, and absorb it. That will either kill you
at once, or drive you back into total psychological withdrawal, autism.'

'Why?'
said Osden. 'Its message is
rejection.
But my salvation
is rejection. It's not intelligent. But I am.'

'The
scale is wrong. What can a single human brain achieve against something so
vast?'

'A
single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,'
Tomiko said, 'and interpret it as Love.'

Mannon
looked from one to the other of them; Harfex was silent.

'It'd
be easier in the forest,' Osden said. 'Which of you will fly me over?'

'When?'

'Now.
Before you all crack up or go violent.'

'I
will,' Tomiko said. 'None of us will,' Harfex said.

'I
can't,' Mannon said. 'I... I am too frightened. I'd crash the jet.'

'Bring
Eskwana along. If I can pull this off, he might serve as a medium.'

'Are
you accepting the Sensor's plan, Coordinator?' Harfex asked formally. 'Yes.'

'I
disapprove. I will come with you, however.'

'I
think we're compelled, Harfex,' Tomiko said, looking at Osden's face, the ugly
white mask transfigured, eager as
a
lover's
face.