The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“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’ emotions, 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.

  “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, ontá, 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 ontá, 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. O
sden 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?”

  “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 tra
nce. “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.”