The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (5 page)

'Then
he can't form any human relationship. All his Dr Hammergeld did was turn an
autism inside out....'

'Poor
frot,' said Olleroo. 'Tomiko, you don't mind if Harfex comes in for a while
tonight, do you?'

'Can't
you go to his cabin? I'm sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned
peeled turnip.'

'You
do hate him, don't you? I guess he feels that. But I slept with Harfex last
night too, and Asnanifoil might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It
would be nicer here.'

'Service
them both,' Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran
subculture, the East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up
chaste.

'I
only like one a night,' Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the
Garden Planet, had never discovered chastity, or the wheel.

'Try
Osden, then,' Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now:
a profound self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism. She had
volunteered for this job because there was, in all probability, no use in doing
it.

The
little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. 'Tomiko, that was a
dirty thing to say.'

'Why?'

'It
would be vile! I'm not attracted to Osden!'

'I
didn't know it mattered to you,' Tomiko said indifferently, though she did
know. She got some papers together and left the cabin, remarking, 'I hope you
and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell; I'm tired.'

Olleroo
was crying, tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily.
Tomiko had not wept since she was ten years old.

It
was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his
computers raised World 4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at
the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched the jade disc grow, a sense of
mutuality grew among them. Osden's selfishness, his accurate cruelty, served
now to draw the others together. 'Perhaps,' Mannon said, 'he was sent as a
beating-gron. What Terrans call a scapegoat Perhaps his influence will be good
after all.' And no one, so careful were they to be kind to one another,
disagreed.

They
came into orbit. There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of
the lines and clots made by animals who build.

'No
men,' Harfex murmured.

'Of
course not,' snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head
inside a polythene bag. He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic
noise he received from the others. 'We're two lightcenturies past the limit of
the Hainish

Expansion,
and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You don't think Creation would
have made the same hideous mistake twice?'

No
one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade
immensity below them, where there was life, but not human life. They were
misfits among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace. Even
Osden did not look quite so expressionless as usual; he was frowning.

Descent
in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like
grass, thick, green, bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against
extended viewcameras, smeared the lenses with a fine pollen.

'It
looks like a pure phytosphere,' Harfex said. 'Osden, do you pick up anything
sentient?'

They
all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup
of tea. He did not answer. He seldom answered spoken questions.

The
chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams
of mad scientists; their chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary
procedure and peck-order, and would have driven a regular service officer out
of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, Dr Haito
Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative
for the first time. 'Mr Sensor Osden,' she said, 'please answer Mr Harfex.'

'How
could I "pick up" anything from outside,' Osden said without turning,
'with the emotions of nine neurotic hominids pullulating around me like worms
in a can? When I have anything to tell you, I'll tell you. I'm aware of my
responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however,
Coordinator Haito, I'll consider my responsibility void.'

'Very
well, Mr Sensor. I trust no orders will be needed henceforth.' Tomiko's
bullfrog voice was calm, but Osden seemed to flinch slightly as he stood with
his back to her, as if the surge of her suppressed rancor had struck him with
physical force.

The
biologist's hunch proved correct. When they began field analyses they found no
animals even among the microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else. All life-forms
were photo-synthesizing or saprophagous, living off light or death, not off
life. Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the visitors from the
house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown,
red. Infinite silences. Only the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm
soughing wind laden with spores and pollens, blowing the sweet pale-green dust
over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather, flowerless forests
where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad
and serene. The Surveyors, wandering like picnickers over sunny plains of
violet filicaliformes, spoke softly to each other. They knew their voices broke
a silence of a thousand million years, the silence of wind and leaves, leaves
and wind, blowing and ceasing and blowing again. They talked softly; but being
human, they talked.

'Poor
old Osden,' said Jenny Chong, Bio and Tech, as she piloted a helijet on the
North Polar Quadrating run. 'All that fancy hi-fi stuff in his brain and
nothing to receive. What a bust.'

'He
told me he hates plants,' Olleroo said with a giggle. 'You'd think he'd like
them, since they don't bother him like we do.'

'Can't
say I much like these plants myself,' said Porlock, looking down at the purple
undulations of the North Circumpolar Forest. 'All the same. No mind. No change.
A man alone in it would go right off his head,'

'But
it's all alive,' Jenny Chong said. 'And if it lives, Osden hates it.'

'He's
not really so bad,' Olleroo said, magnanimous. Porlock looked at her sidelong
and asked, 'You ever slept with him, Olleroo?'

Olleroo
burst into tears and cried, 'You Terrans are obscene!'

'No
she hasn't,' Jenny Chong said, prompt to defend. 'Have you, Porlock?'

The
chemist laughed uneasily: ha, ha, ha. Flecks of spittle appeared on his
mustache.

'Osden
can't bear to be touched,' Olleroo said shakily. 'I just brushed against him
once by accident and he knocked me off like I was some sort of dirty ... thing.
We're all just things, to him.'

'He's
evil,' Porlock said in a strained voice, startling the two women. 'He'll end up
shattering this team, sabotaging it, one way or another. Mark my words. He's
not fit to live with other people!'

They
landed on the North Pole. A midnight sun smouldered over low hills. Short, dry,
greenish-pink bryoform grasses stretched away in every direction, which was all
one direction, south. Subdued by the incredible silence, the three Surveyors
set up their instruments and set to work, three viruses twitching minutely on
the hide of an unmoving giant.

Nobody
asked Osden along on runs as pilot or photographer or recorder, and he never
volunteered, so he seldom left base camp. He ran Harfex's botanical taxonomic
data through the onship computers, and served as assistant to Eskwana, whose
job here was mainly repair and maintenance. Eskwana had begun to sleep a great
deal, twenty-five hours or more out of the thirty-two-hour day, dropping off in
the middle of repairing a radio or checking the guidance circuits of a helijet.
The Coordinator stayed at base one day to observe. No one else was home except
Poswet To, who was subject to epileptic fits; Mannon had plugged her into a
therapy-circuit today in a state of preventive catatonia. Tomiko spoke reports
into the storage banks, and kept an eye on Osden and Eskwana. Two hours passed.

'You
might want to use the 860 microwaldoes in sealing that connection,' Eskwana
said in his soft, hesitant voice.

'Obviously!'

'Sorry.
I just saw you had the 840's there—'

'And
will replace them when I take the 860's out. When

I
don't know how to proceed, Engineer, I'll ask your advice.'

After
a minute "Tomiko looked round. Sure enough, there was Eskwana sound
asleep, head on the table, thumb in his mouth.

'Osden.'

The
white face did not turn, he did not speak, but conveyed impatiently that he was
listening.

'You
can't be unaware of Eskwana's vulnerability.'

'I
am not responsible for his psychopathic reactions.'

'But
you are responsible for your own. Eskwana is essential to our work here, and
you're not. If you can't control your hostility, you must avoid him
altogether.'

Osden
put down his tools and stood up. 'With pleasure!' he said in his vindictive,
scraping voice. 'You could not possibly imagine what it's like to experience
Eskwana's irrational terrors. To have to share his horrible cowardice, to have
to cringe with him at everything!'

'Are
you trying to justify your cruelty towards him? I thought you had more
self-respect.' Tomiko found herself shaking with spite. 'If your empathic power
really makes you share Ander's misery, why does it never induce the least compassion
in you?'

'Compassion,'
Osden said. 'Compassion. What do you know about compassion?'

She
stared at him, but he would not look at her.

'Would
you like me to verbalize your present emotional affect regarding myself?' he
said. 'I can do so more precisely than you can. I'm trained to analyze such
responses as I receive them. And I do receive them.'

'But
how can you expect me to feel kindly towards you when you behave as you do?'

'What
does it matter how I
behave,
you stupid
sow, do you think it makes any difference? Do you think the average human is a
well of loving-kindness? My choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being
a woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated.'

'That's
rot. Self-pity. Every man has—'

'But
I am not a man,' Osden said, 'There are all of you. And there is myself. I am
one.'

Awed
by that glimpse of abysmal solipsism, she kept silent
a
while;
finally she said with neither spite nor pity, clinically, 'You could kill
yourself, Osden.'

'That's
your way, Haito,' he jeered. 'I'm not depressive, and
seppuku
isn't my
bit. What do you want me to do here?'

'Leave.
Spare yourself and us. Take the aircar and a data-feeder and go do a species
count. In the forest; Harfex hasn't even started the forests yet. Take a
hundred-square-meter forested area, anywhere inside radio range. But outside
empathy range. Report in at 8 and 24 o'clock daily.'

Osden
went, and nothing was heard from him for five days but laconic all-well signals
twice daily. The mood at base camp changed like a stage-set. Eskwana stayed
awake up to eighteen hours a day. Poswet To got out her stellar lute and
chanted the celestial harmonies (music had driven Osden into
a
frenzy).
Mannon, Harfex, Jenny Chong, and Tomiko all went off tranquillizers. Porlock
distilled something in his laboratory and drank it all by himself. He had a
hangover. Asnanifoil and Poswet To held an all-night Numerical Epiphany, that
mystical orgy of higher mathematics which is the chief pleasure of the
religious Cetian soul. Olleroo slept with everybody. Work went well.

The
Hard Scientist came towards base at
a
run,
laboring through the high, fleshy stalks of the graminiformes. 'Something - in
the forest—' His eyes bulged, he panted, his mustache and fingers trembled.
'Something big. Moving, behind me. I was putting in a benchmark, bending down.
It came at me. As if it was swinging down out of the trees. Behind me.' He
stared at the others with the opaque eyes of terror or exhaustion.