by Buffalo Gals
“You’re right,” Mannon said, almost whispering. “It has no peers. No enemies. No relationship with anything but itself. One alone forever.”
“Then what’s the function of its intelligence in species survival?”
“None, maybe,” Osden said. “Why are you getting teleological, Harfex? Aren’t you a Hainishman? Isn’t the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?”
Harfex did not take the bait. He looked ill. “We should leave this world,” he said.
“Now you know why I always want to get out, get away from you,” Osden said with a kind of morbid geniality. “It isn’t pleasant, is it—the other’s fear…? If only it were an animal intelligence. I can get through to animals. I get along with cobras and tigers; superior intelligence gives one the advantage. I should have been used in a zoo, not on a human team…If I could get through to the damned stupid potato! If it wasn’t so overwhelming…I still pick up more than the fear, you know. And before it panicked it had a—there was a serenity. I couldn’t take it in, then, I didn’t realize how big it was. To know the whole daylight, after all, and the whole night. All the winds and lulls together. The winter stars and the summer stars at the same time. To have roots, and no enemies. To be entire. Do you see? No invasion. No others. To be whole…”
He had never spoken before, Tomiko thought.
“You are defenseless against it, Osden,” she said. “Your personality has changed already. You’re vulnerable to it. We may not all go mad, but you will, if we don’t leave.”
He hesitated, then he looked up at Tomiko, the first time he had ever met her eyes, a long, still look, clear as water.
“What’s sanity ever done for me?” he said, mocking. “But you have a point, Haito. You have something there.”
“We should get away,” Harfex muttered.
“If I gave in to it,” Osden mused, “could I communicate?”
“By ‘give in,’” Mannon said in a rapid, nervous voice, “I assume that you mean, stop sending back the empathic information which you receive from the plant-entity: stop rejecting the fear, and absorb it. That will either kill you at once, or drive you back into total psychological withdrawal, autism.”
“Why?” said Osden. “Its message is rejection. But my salvation is rejection. It’s not intelligent. But I am.”
“The scale is wrong. What can a single human brain achieve against something so vast?”
“A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.”
Mannon looked from one to the other of them; Harfex was silent.
“It’d be easier in the forest,” Osden said. “Which of you will fly me over?”
“When?”
“Now. Before you all crack up or go violent.”
“I will,” Tomiko said.
“None of us will,” Harfex said.
“I can’t,” Mannon said. “I…I am too frightened. I’d crash the jet.”
“Bring Eskwana along. If I can pull this off, he might serve as a medium.”
“Are you accepting the Sensor’s plan, Coordinator?” Harfex asked formally.
“Yes.”
“I disapprove. I will come with you, however.”
“I think we’re compelled, Harfex,” Tomiko said, looking at Osden’s face, the ugly white mask transfigured, eager as a lover’s face.
Olleroo and Jenny Chong, playing cards to keep their thoughts from their haunted beds, their mounting dread, chattered like scared children. “This thing, it’s in the forest, it’ll get you—”
“Scared of the dark?” Osden jeered.
“But look at Eskwana, and Porlock, and even Asnanifoil—”
“It can’t hurt you. It’s an impulse passing through synapses, a wind passing through branches. It is only a nightmare.”
They took off in a helijet, Eskwana curled up still sound asleep in the rear compartment, Tomiko piloting, Harfex and Osden silent, watching ahead for the dark line of the forest across the vague grey miles of starlit plain. They neared the black line, crossed it; now under them was darkness.
She sought a landing place, flying low, though she had to fight her frantic wish to fly high, to get out, get away. The huge vitality of the plant-world was far stronger here in the forest, and its panic beat in immense dark waves. There was a pale patch ahead, a bare knoll-top a little higher than the tallest of the black shapes around it, the not-trees; the rooted; the parts of the whole. She set the helijet down in the glade, a bad landing. Her hands on the stick were slippery, as if she had rubbed them with cold soap.
About them now stood the forest, black in darkness.
Tomiko cowered and shut her eyes. Eskwana moaned in his sleep. Harfex’s breath came short and loud, and he sat rigid, even when Osden reached across him and slid the door open.
Osden stood up; his back and bandaged head were just visible in the dim glow of the control panel as he paused stooping in the doorway.
Tomiko was shaking. She could not raise her head. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she said in a whisper. “No. No. No.”
Osden moved suddenly and quietly, swinging out of the doorway, down into the dark. He was gone.
I am coming! said a great voice that made no sound.
Tomiko screamed. Harfex coughed; he seemed to be trying to stand up, but did not do so.
Tomiko drew in upon herself, all centered in the blind eye in her belly, in the center of her being, and outside that there was nothing but the fear.
It ceased.
She raised her head; slowly unclenched her hands. She sat up straight. The night was dark, and stars shone over the forest. There was nothing else.
“Osden,” she said, but her voice would not come. She spoke again, louder, a lone bullfrog croak. There was no reply.
She began to realize that something had gone wrong with Harfex. She was trying to find his head in the darkness, for he had slipped down from the seat, when all at once, in the dead quiet, in the dark rear compartment of the craft, a voice spoke. “Good,” it said. It was Eskwana’s voice. She snapped on the interior lights and saw the engineer lying curled up asleep, his hand half over his mouth.
The mouth opened and spoke. “All well,” it said.
“Osden—”
“All well,” said the voice from Eskwana’s mouth.
“Where are you?”
Silence.
“Come back.”
A wind was rising. “I’ll stay here,” the soft voice said.
“You can’t stay—”
Silence.
“You’d be alone, Osden!”
“Listen.” The voice was fainter, slurred, as if lost in the sound of wind. “Listen. I will you well.”
She called his name after that, but there was no answer. Eskwana lay still. Harfex lay stiller.
“Osden!” she cried, leaning out the doorway into the dark, wind-shaken silence of the forest of being. “I will come back. I must get Harfex to the base. I will come back, Osden!”
Silence and wind in leaves.
They finished the prescribed survey of World 4470, the eight of them; it took them forty-one days more. Asnanifoil and one or another of the women went into the forest daily at first, searching for Osden in the region around the bare knoll, though Tomiko was not in her heart sure which bare knoll they had landed on that night in the very heart and vortex of terror. They left piles of supplies for Osden, food enough for fifty years, clothing, tents, tools. They did not go on searching; there was no way to find a man alone, hiding, if he wanted to hide, in those unending labyrinths and dim corridors vine-entangled, root-floored. They might have passed within arm’s reach of him and never seen him.
But he was there; for there was no fear any more. Rational, and valuing reason more highly after an intolerable experience of the immortal mindless, Tomiko tried to understand rationally what Osden had done. But the words escaped her control. He had taken the fear into himself, and,
accepting, had transcended it. He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.—But this is not the vocabulary of reason.
The people of the Survey team walked under the trees, through the vast colonies of life, surrounded by a dreaming silence, a brooding calm that was half aware of them and wholly indifferent to them. There were no hours. Distance was no matter. Had we but world enough and time…The planet turned between the sunlight and the great dark; winds of winter and summer blew fine, pale pollen across the quiet seas.
Gum returned after many surveys, years, and lightyears, to what had several centuries ago been Smeming Port. There were still men there, to receive (incredulously) the team’s reports, and to record its losses: Biologist Harfex, dead of fear, and Sensor Osden, left as a colonist.
(1971)
Seven Bird and Beast Poems
Various real or imaginary relations and comminglings of human and other beings are going on here. The last one is a true ghost story.
The first one is a joke about one of my favorite kinds of bird, the acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus in Latin, boso in Kesh). They are handsome little woodpeckers, still common in Northern California, splendidly marked, with a red cap, and a white circle round the eye giving them a clown’s mad stare. They talk all the time—the loud yacka-yacka-yacka call, and all kinds of mutters, whirs, purrs, comments, criticisms, and gossip going on constantly among the foraging or housekeeping group. They are familial or tribal. Cousins and aunts help a mated pair feed and bring up the babies. Why they make holes and drop acorns into them when they can’t get the acorns back out of the holes is still a question (to ornithologists—not to acorn woodpeckers). When we removed the wasp- and woodpecker-riddled back outer wall of an old California farmhouse last year, about a ton of acorns fell out, all worm-hollowed husks; they had never been accessible to the generations of Bosos who had been diligently dropping them in since 1870 or so. But in the walls of the bam are neat rows of little holes, each one with a long Valley Oak acorn stuck in, a perfect fit, almost like rivets in sheet iron. These, presumably, are winter supply. On the other hand, they might be a woodpecker art form. Another funny thing they do is in spring, very early in the morning, when a male wants to assert the tribal territory and/or impress the hell out of some redhead. He finds a tree that makes a really loud sound, and drums on it. The loudest tree these days—a fine example of the interfacing of human and woodpecker cultures—is a metal chimney sticking up from a farmhouse roof. A woodpecker doing the kettledrum reveille on the stovepipe is a real good way to start the day at attention.
What is Going on in the Oaks Around the Barn
The Acorn Woodpeckers
are constructing an Implacable
Pecking Machine to attack oaks
and whack holes to stack acorns in.
They have not perfected
it yet. They keep cranking
it up ratchet by ratchet
by ratchet each morning
till a Bluejay yells, “SCRAP!”
and it all collapses
into black-and-white flaps and flutters
and redheads muttering curses
in the big, protecting branches.
(1986)
For Ted
The hawk shapes the wind
and the curve of the wind
Like eggs lie the great gold hills
in the curve of the world
to that keen eye
The children wait
The hawk declares height
by his fell fall
The children cry
Comes the high hunter
carrying the kill
curving the winds
with strong wings
To the old hawk
all earth is prey, and child
(1973)
Found Poem
However, Bruce Baird, Laguna Beach’s chief lifeguard, doubts that sea lions could ever replace, or even really aid, his staff. “If you were someone from Ohio, and you were in the water having trouble and a sea lion approached you, well, it would require a whole lot more public education,” he told the Orange County Register.
—PAUL SIMON, for AP, 17 December 1984
If I am ever someone from Ohio
in the water having trouble
off a continent’s west edge
and am translated to my element
by a sudden warm great animal
with sea-dark fur sleek shining
and the eyes of Shiva,
I hope to sink my troubles like a stone
and all uneducated ride
her inshore shouting with the foam
praises of the freedom to be saved.
(1986)
Totem
Mole my totem
mound builder
maze maker
tooth at the root
shaper of darkness
into ways and hollows
in grave alive
heavy handed
light blinded
(1979)
Winter Downs
(For Barbara)
Eyes look at you.
Thorns catch at you.
Heart starts and bleats.
The looks are rocks
white-ringed with chalk:
flint fish-eyes of old seas,
sheep’s flint-dark gaze.
Chalk is sheep-white.
Clouds take shape
and quiet of sheep.
Thorn’s hands hold stolen fleece.
The stones sleep open-eyed.
Keep watch: be not afraid.
(1980)
The Man Eater
They’d all run away then.
We came out of the hovels
by the well to wait
as that one came soft
from the branched dark
into the moon-round singing
to wear garlands
by children woven, given.
An old one of us
brought the goat out
fed well, also garlanded,
but that one ignored
the goat and cast about
among huts and gardens
hunting, hunting.
“They’re gone,” we sang
while the children
let the goat go.
“They ran away,”
we sang, dancing,
dancing hunting
with that one, with her
who is branched with darkness
and shining,
and is not afraid.
(1986)
Sleeping Out
Don’t turn on the flashlight, we won’t see
what’s crashing its way slow
down there in the foggy darkness
thickening the air with a smell
like wet deadness smoldering,
or why the crickets went still
and coyotes giggle behind the hill.
The light will make a hole
in the air and what we fear
will be more there all round
it in the dark brush and the old dark mind.
(1985)
“The White Donkey” and
“Horse Camp”
In these two stories, the relationship is that natural, universal, and mysterious one between the child and the animal.
“The White Donkey” was written in the white-hot dawn of a summer morning during the Writers Conference at Indiana University. I had asked the writers in my workshop to write a “last contact” story—“first contact” is a very common theme in science fiction, of which the films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. are trivial but familiar examples. This story, however, is not science fiction but fantasy, since the creature in question is not an ‘alien’ or an extra-terrestrial, but just the opposite. It is an animal whose habitat is restricted to the human imagination. Even there it flo
urishes only within the Western European ecosystem, where a few years ago it experienced quite a population explosion, reproducing itself all over greeting cards, posters, book covers, and other curious ecological niches. But to the child in this story, no recognition is possible.
“Horse Camp” seems to trouble people, even some who have gone through, or had daughters go through, the “horse stage.” Perhaps what troubles them is that one can hear in it a yell of freedom and a scream from the trap in the same voice at the same time. Or maybe they just want to know how. I don’t know.
The White Donkey
THERE WERE SNAKES in the old stone place, but the grass grew so green and rank there that she brought the goats back every day. “The goats are looking fat,” Nana said. “Where are you grazing them, Sita?” And when Sita said, “At the old stone place, in the forest,” Nana said, “It’s a long way to take them,” and Uncle Hira said, “Look out for snakes in that place,” but they were thinking of the goats, not of her: so she did not ask them, after all, about the white donkey.
She had seen the donkey first when she was putting flowers on the red stone under the pipal tree at the edge of the forest. She liked that stone. It was the Goddess, very old, round, sitting comfortably among the roots of the tree. Everybody who passed by there left the Goddess some flowers or poured a bit of water on her, and every spring her red paint was renewed. Sita was giving the Goddess a rhododendron flower when she looked round, thinking one of the goats was straying off into the forest; but it wasn’t a goat.
It was a white animal that had caught her eye, whiter than a Brahminee bull. Sita followed, to see what it was. When she saw the neat round rump and the tail like a rope with a tassel, she knew it was a donkey; but such a beautiful donkey! And whose? There were three donkeys in the village, and Chandra Bose owned two, all of them grey, bony, mournful, laborious beasts. This was a tall, sleek, delicate donkey, a wonderful donkey. It could not belong to Chandra Bose, or to anybody in the village, or to anybody in the other village. It wore no halter or harness. It must be wild; it must live in the forest alone.