The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “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 eight and twenty-four 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 her stellar lute and chanted the celestial harmonies (music had driven Osden into a frenzy). Mannon, Harfex, Jenny Chong, and Tomiko all went off tranquilizers. 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.

  “Sit down, Porlock. Take it easy. Now wait, go through this again. You saw something—”

  “Not clearly. Just the movement. Purposive. A—an—I don’t know what it could have been. Something self-moving. In the trees, the arboriformes, whatever you call ’em. At the edge of the woods.”

  Harfex looked grim. “There is nothing here that could attack you, Porlock. There are not even microzoa. There could not be a large animal.”

  “Could you possibly have seen an epiphyte drop suddenly, a vine come loose behind you?”

  “No,” Porlock said. “It was coming down at me, through the branches. When I turned it took off again, away and upward. It made a noise, a sort of crashing. If it wasn’t an animal, God knows what it could have been! It was big—as big as a man, at least. Maybe a reddish color. I couldn’t see, I’m not sure.”

  “It was Osden,” said Jenny Chong, “doing a Tarzan act.” She giggled nervously, and Tomiko repressed a wild feckless laugh. But Harfex was not smiling.

  “One gets uneasy under the arboriformes,” he said in his polite, repressed voice. “I’ve noticed that. Indeed that may be why I’ve put off working in the forests. There’s a hypnotic quality in the colors and spacing of the stems and branches, especially the helically arranged ones; and the spore-throwers grow so regularly spaced that it seems unnatural. I find it quite disagreeable, subjectively speaking. I wonder if a stronger effect of that sort mightn’t have produced a hallucination…?”

  Porlock shook his head. He wet his lips. “It was there,” he said. “Something. Moving with purpose. Trying to attack me from behind.”

  When Osden called in, punctual as always, at twenty-four o’clock that night, Harfex told him Porlock’s report. “Have you come on anything at all, Mr. Osden, that could substantiate Mr. Porlock’s impression of a motile, sentient life-form, in the forest?”

  Ssss, the radio said sardonically. “No. Bullshit,” said Osden’s unpleasant voice.

  “You’ve been actually inside the forest longer than any of us,” Harfex said with unmitigable politeness. “Do you agree with my impression that the forest ambiance has a rather troubling and possibly hallucinogenic effect on the perceptions?”

  Ssss. “I’ll agree that Porlock’s perceptions are easily troubled. Keep him in his lab, he’ll do less harm. Anything else?”

  “Not at present,” Harfex said, and Osden cut off.

  Nobody could credit Porlock’s story, and nobody could discredit it. He was positive that something, something big, had tried to attack him by surprise. It was hard to deny this, for they were on an alien world, and everyone who had entered the forest had felt a certain chill and foreboding under the “trees.” (“Call them trees, certainly,” Harfex had said. “They really are the same thing only, of course, altogether different.”) They agreed that they had felt uneasy, or had had the sense that something was watching them from behind.

  “We’ve got to clear this up,” Porlock said, and he asked to be sent as a temporary Biologist’s Aide, like Osden, into the forest to explore and observe. Olleroo and Jenny Chong volunteered if they could go as a pair. Harfex sent them all off into the forest near which they were encamped, a vast tract covering four-fifths of Continent D. He forbade sidearms. They were not to go outside a fifty-mile half-circle, which included Osden’s current site. They all reported in twice daily, for three days. Porlock reported a glimpse of what seemed to be a large semi-erect shape moving through the trees across the river; Olleroo was sure she had heard something moving near the tent, the second night.

  “There are no animals on this planet,” Harfex said, dogged.

  Then Osden missed his morning call.

  Tomiko waited less than an hour, then flew with Harfex to the area where Osden had reported himself the night before. But as the helijet hovered over the sea of purplish leaves, illimitable, impenetrable, she felt a panicked despair. “How can we find him in this?”

  “He reported landing on the riverbank. Find the aircar; he’ll be camped near it, and he can’t have gone far from his camp. Species-counting is slow work. There’s the river.”

  “There’s his car,” Tomiko said, catching the bright foreign glint among the vegetable colors and shadows. “Here goes, then.”

  She put the ship in hover and pitched out the ladder. She and Harfex descended. The sea of life closed over their heads.

  As her feet touched the forest floor, she unsnapped the flap of her holster; then, glancing at Harfex, who was unarmed, she left the gun untouched. But her hand kept coming back to it. There was no sound at all, as soon as they were a few meters away from the slow, brown river, and the light was dim. Great boles stood well apart, almost regularly, almost alike; they were soft-skinned, some appearing smooth and others spongy, grey or greenish-brown or brown, twined with cable-like creepers and festooned with epiphytes, extending rigid, entangled armfuls of big saucer-shaped, dark leaves that formed a roof-layer twenty to thirty meters thick. The ground underfoot was springy as a mattress, every inch of it knotted with roots and peppered with small, fleshy-leafed growths.

  “Here’s his tent,” Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community of the voiceless. In the tent was Osden’s sleeping bag, a couple of books, a box of rations. We should be calling, shouting for him, she thought, but did not even suggest it; nor did Harfex. They circled out from the tent, careful to keep each other in sight through the thick-standing presences, the crowding gloom. She stumbled over Osden’s body, not thirty meters from the tent, led to it by the whitish gleam of a dropped notebook. He lay facedown between two huge-rooted trees. His head and hands were covered with blood, some dried, some still oozing red.

  Harfex appeared beside her, his pale Hainish complexion quite green in the dusk. “Dead?”

  “No. He’s been struck. Beaten. From behind.” Tomiko’s fingers felt over the bloody skull and temples and nape. “A weapon or a tool…I don’t find a fracture.”

  As she turned Osden’s body over so they could lift him, his eyes opened. She was holding him, bending close to his face. His pale lips writhed. A deathly fear came into her. She screamed aloud two or three times and tried to run away, shambling and stumbling into the terrible dusk. Harfex caught her, and at his touch and the sound of his voice, her panic decreased. “What is it? What is it?” he was saying.

  “I don’t know,” she sobbed. Her heartbeat still shook her, and she could not see clearly. “The fear—the…I panicked. When I saw his eyes.”

  “We’re both nervous. I don’t understand this—”

  “I’m all right now, come on, we’ve got to get him under care.”

  Both working with senseless ha
ste, they lugged Osden to the riverside and hauled him up on a rope under his armpits; he dangled like a sack, twisting a little, over the glutinous dark sea of leaves. They pulled him into the helijet and took off. Within a minute they were over open prairie. Tomiko locked onto the homing beam. She drew a deep breath, and her eyes met Harfex’s. “I was so terrified I almost fainted. I have never done that.”

  “I was…unreasonably frightened also,” said the Hainishman, and indeed he looked aged and shaken. “Not so badly as you. But as unreasonably.”

  “It was when I was in contact with him, holding him. He seemed to be conscious for a moment.”

  “Empathy?…I hope he can tell us what attacked him.”

  Osden, like a broken dummy covered with blood and mud, half lay as they had bundled him into the rear seats in their frantic urgency to get out of the forest.

  More panic met their arrival at base. The ineffective brutality of the assault was sinister and bewildering. Since Harfex stubbornly denied any possibility of animal life they began speculating about sentient plants, vegetable monsters, psychic projections. Jenny Chong’s latent phobia reasserted itself and she could talk about nothing except the Dark Egos which followed people around behind their backs. She and Olleroo and Porlock had been summoned back to base; and nobody was much inclined to go outside.

  Osden had lost a good deal of blood during the three or four hours he had lain alone, and concussion and severe contusions had put him in shock and semi-coma. As he came out of this and began running a low fever he called several times for “Doctor,” in a plaintive voice: “Dr. Hammergeld…” When he regained full consciousness, two of those long days later, Tomiko called Harfex into his cubicle.

  “Osden: can you tell us what attacked you?”

  The pale eyes flickered past Harfex’s face.

  “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 grasped 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 tranquilizers. 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…It is 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, 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 se
ntience.”

  “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?”