the wind's twelve quarters (24 page)

“Why Mr. Ralph,” came the soft lilting Southern voice, “Ah’m just a little bit stubborn.”
 

“You realize, don’t you, that Yankee as I am, I own all the land from here to Weevilville? I own this county! Your farm wouldn’t make a peanut-patch for one of my darkies’ kitchen gardens!”
 

“Indeed not. Won’t you come sit down in the shade, Mr Ralph? Youah gettin’ so hot out theah.”
 

“You proud vixen,” he murmured, turning. He saw her, white as a lily in her worn old dress, in the shade of the great old trees: the white lily of the garden. Suddenly he was at her feet, clasping her hands. She fluttered in his powerful grasp. “Oh Mr
Ralph,” she cried faintly, “what does this mean?”
 

“I am a man, Amanda, and you are a woman. I never wanted your land. I never
wanted anything but you, my white lily, my little rebel! I want you, I want you! Amanda! Say you will be my wife!”
 

“Ah will,” she breathed faintly, bending towards him as a white flower stoops; and their lips met in a long, long kiss. But it did not seem to help at all.
 

Perhaps it ought to be moved up twenty or thirty years.
 

“You sick bitch,” he muttered, turning. He saw her, stark naked there in the shade, her back against the pecan tree, her knees up. He strode towards her unbuttoning his fly. They coupled in the centipede-infested crabgrass. He bucked like a bronco, she cried ululatingly, Oooh! Aaah! Coming coming coming come wow wow wow CLIMAX!
 

Now what?
 

Blank stood at a little distance from the forest and stared disconsolately at the other.
 

“Am I a man?” he inquired. “Are you a woman?”
 

“Don’t ask me,” the other said, morose.
 

“I thought surely that was the most important thing to establish!”
 

“Not so damned important.”
 

“You mean it doesn’t matter if I am a man or a woman?”
 

“Of course it matters. It matters to me too. It also matters which man and which woman we are or, as the case may be, are not. For instance, what if Amanda was black?”
 

“But sex.”
 

“Oh, Hell,” said the other with a flare of temper, “bristleworms have sex, tree-sloths have sex, Jean-Paul Sartre has sex—what does it prove?”
 

“Why, sex is real, I mean really real—it’s having and acting in its intensest form. When a man takes a woman he proves his being!”
 

“I see. But what if he’s a woman?”
 

“I was Ralph.”
 

“Try being Amanda,” the other said sourly.
 

There was a pause. Shadows were coming on eastward and upward from the forest over the grass. Small birds cried jug, jug, tereu. Blank sat hunched over his knees. The other lay stretched out, making patterns with fallen pine needles, shadowed, sorrowful.
 

“I’m sorry,” blank said.
 

“No harm done,” the other said. “After all, it wasn’t real.”
 

“Listen,” blank said, leaping up, “I know what’s
 

happened! I’m on some kind of trip. I took something, and I’m on a trip, that’s it!”
 

It was. He was on a trip. A canoe trip. He was paddling a small canoe along a long, narrow, dark, shining stretch of water. The roof and walls were of concrete. It was pretty dark. The long lake, or stream, or sewer, slanted upward visibly. He was paddling against the current, uphill. It was hard work, but the canoe kept sliding forward upriver as silently as the black shining water moved back down. He kept his strokes quiet, the paddle entering the water silent as a knife in butter. His large black-and-pearl electric guitar lay on the forward seat. He knew there was somebody behind him, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t allowed to say anything or even look around, so if they didn’t keep up that was their lookout, he couldn’t be called responsible. He certainly couldn’t slow down, the current might get hold of his canoe and pull it right out from under him and then where’d he be? He shut his eyes and kept paddling, silent entry, strong stroke. There was no sound behind him. The water made no sound. The cement made no sound. He wondered if he was actually going forward or only hanging still while the black water ran hellbent beneath. He would
never get out to daylight. Out, out—
 

Out. The other didn’t even seem to have noticed that blank had been away on a trip,
but just lay there making patterns with pine needles, and presently said, “How is your memory?”
 

Blank searched it to see if it had improved while he was away. There was less in it than before. The cupboard was bare. There was a lot of junk in the cellars and attics, old toys, nursery rhymes, myths, old wives' tales, but no nourishment for adults, no least scrap of possession, not a crumb of success. He searched and searched like a starving methodical rat. At last he said uncertainly, “I do remember England.”
 

“Why surely. I expect you can even remember Omaha.”
 

“But I mean, I remember being in England.”
 

“Do you?” The other sat up, scattering pinestraw.
 

“You do remember being, then! What a pity England sank.”
 

They were silent again.
 

“I have lost everything.”
 

There was a darkness in the other’s eyes and on the eastern edge of the earth plunging down the steepening slopes of night.
 

“I’m nobody.”
 

“At least,” said the other, “you know you’re human.”
 

“Oh, what good’s that? with no name, no sex, no nothing? I might as well be a bristleworm or a tree-sloth!”
 

“You might as well,” the other agreed, “be Jean-Paul Sartre.”
 

“I?” said blank, offended. Driven to denial by so nauseous a notion, he stood up and said, “I certainly am not Jean-Paul Sartre. I am myself.” And so saying he found himself to be, in fact, himself; his name was Lewis D. Charles and he knew it as well as he knew his own name. There he was.
 

The forest was there, root and branch.
 

The other was, however, gone.
 

Lewis D. Charles looked in the red eye of the west and the dark eye of the east. He shouted aloud, “Come back! Please come back!”
 

He had gone at it all wrong, backwards. He had found the wrong name. He turned, and without the least impulse of self-preservation plunged into the pathless forest, casting himself away so that he might find what he had cast away.
 

Under the trees he forgot his name again at once. He also forgot what he was looking for. What was it he had lost? He went deeper and deeper into shadows, under leaves, eastward, in the forest where nameless tigers burned.
 

Trees again.
 

As I recall, Robert Silverberg, who first published this story in New Dimensions 1, asked very gently if I would change the title. I could see where a reader about halfway through might find the title all too descriptive of the story itself; but it was too beautiful, and too beautifully apt, to part with, and Mr Silverberg let me keep it. It’s from Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress"—
 

Our vegetable love should grow
 

Vaster than empires, and more slow....
 

Like “Nine Lives,” this is not a psychomyth but a regular science fiction story, developed not for action/adventure, but psychologically. Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens. Obviously my interest is in what goes on inside. Inner space and all that. We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
 

Hidden in the foliage here is a tiny act of homage. The protagonist of “He Who Shapes" by Roger Zelazny, one of the finest science fiction stories I know, is called Charles Render. I christened a syndrome after him.
 

It was only during the earliest decades of the League that the Earth sent ships out on the enormously long voyages, beyond the pale, over the stars and far away. They were seeking for worlds which had not been seeded or settled by the Founders on Hain, truly alien worlds. All the Known Worlds went back to the Hainish Origin, and the Terrans, having been not only founded but salvaged by the Hainish, resented this. They wanted to get away from the family. They wanted to find somebody new. The Hainish, like tiresomely understanding parents, supported their explorations, and contributed ships and volunteers, as did several other worlds of the League.
 

All these volunteers to the Extreme Survey crews shared one peculiarity: they were of unsound mind.
 

What sane person, after all, would go out to collect information that would not be received for five or ten centuries? Cosmic mass interference had not yet been eliminated from the operation of the ansible, and so instantaneous communication was reliable only within a range of 120 lightyears. The explorers would be quite isolated. And of course they had no idea what they might come back to, if they came back. No normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts.
 

Ten of them climbed aboard the ferry at Smeming Port, and made varyingly inept attempts to get to know one another during the three days the ferry took getting to their ship, Gum. Gum is a Cetian nickname, on the order of Baby or Pet. There were two Cetians on the team, two Hainishmen, one Beldene, and five Terrans; the Cetian-built ship was chartered by the Government of Earth. Her motley crew came aboard wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like apprehensive
 

spermatozoa trying to fertilize the universe. The ferry left, and the navigator put Gum underway. She flittered for some hours on the edge of space a few hundred
million miles from Smeming Port, and then abruptly vanished.
 

When, after 10 hours 29 minutes, or 256 years, Gum reappeared in normal space, she was supposed to be in the vicinity of Star KG-E-96651. Sure enough, there was the gold pinhead of the star. Somewhere within a four-hundred-million-kilometer sphere there was also a greenish planet. World 4470, as charted by a Cetian mapmaker. The ship now had to find the planet. This was not quite so easy as it might sound, given a four-hundred-million-kilometer haystack. And Gum couldn’t bat about in planetary space at near lightspeed; if she did, she and Star KG-E-96651 and World 4470 might all end up going bang. She had to creep, using rocket propulsion, at a few hundred thousand miles an hour. The Mathematician/Navigator, Asnanifoil, knew pretty well where the planet ought to be, and thought they might raise it within ten E-days. Meanwhile the members of the Survey team got to know one another still better.
 

“I can’t stand him,” said Porlock, the Hard Scientist (chemistry, plus physics, astronomy, geology, etc.), and little blobs of spittle appeared on his mustache. “The man is insane. I can’t imagine why he was passed as fit to join a Survey team, unless this is a deliberate experiment in noncompatibility, planned by the Authority, with us as guinea pigs.”
 

“We generally use hamsters and Hainish gholes,” said Mannon, the Soft Scientist (psychology, plus psychiatry, anthropology, ecology, etc.), politely; he was one of the Hainish men. “Instead of guinea pigs. Well, you know, Mr Osden is really a very rare case. In fact, he’s the first fully cured case of Render’s Syndrome—a variety of infantile autism which was thought to be incurable. The great Terran analyst Hammergeld reasoned that the cause of the autistic condition in this case is a supernormal empathic capacity, and developed an appropriate treatment. Mr Osden is the first patient to undergo that treatment, in fact he lived with Dr Hammergeld until he was eighteen. The therapy was completely successful.
 

“Successful?”
 

“Why, yes. He certainly is not autistic.”
 

“No, he’s intolerable!”
 

“Well, you see,” said Mannon, gazing mildly at the saliva-flecks on Porlock’s mustache, “the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting —let’s say you and Mr Osden just for example—is something you’re scarcely aware of; habit, manners, inattention get you past it; you’ve learned to ignore it, to the point where you might even deny it exists. However, Mr Osden, being an empath, feels it. Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which is which. Let’s say that there’s a normal element of hostility towards any stranger in your emotional reaction to him when you meet him, plus a spontaneous dislike of his looks, or clothes, or handshake—it doesn’t matter what. He feels that dislike. As his autistic defense has been unlearned, he resorts to an aggressive-defense mechanism, a response in kind to the aggression which you have unwittingly projected onto him.” Mannon went on for quite a long time.
 

“Nothing gives a man the right to be such a bastard,” Porlock said.
 

“He can’t tune us out?” asked Harfex, the Biologist, another Hainishman.
 

“It’s like hearing,” said Olleroo, Assistant Hard Scientist, stooping over to paint her toenails with fluorescent lacquer. “No eyelids on your ears. No Off switch on empathy. He hears our feelings whether he wants to or not.”
 

“Does he know what we’re thinking?” asked Eskwana, the Engineer, looking round at the others in real dread.