by Buffalo Gals
“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 said, 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 around 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 effects 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?”
“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 hear
d 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…”
“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.”
