the wind's twelve quarters (26 page)

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 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 micro-zoa. 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, fast. 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 arboriforms,” 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 24 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 side-arms. 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 panic despair. “How can we find him in this?” “He reported landing on the riverbank. Find the air-car; 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 up 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 cablelike 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-leaved 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 face down 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 haste, 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: “Doctor 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?”