Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "Can't you understand that I don't give a damn for all of you?" Osden said, took up his microtapes, and went out. Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil was drawing slipstreams in the air with his finger and muttering the Ritual Primes. "You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on the part of the Terran Authority. I saw this almost at once. This mission is meant to fail," Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder. Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. I did tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.

  All the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their fellow team members intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally sympathetic. They had to work together in close quarters and nasty places, and could expect one another's paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias and compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least most of the time. Osden might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and his personality was disastrous. He had been sent only on account of his singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range bioempathic receptivity. His talent wasn't species-specific; he could pick up emotion or sentience from anything that felt He could share lust with a white rat, pain with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy with a moth. On an alien world, the Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything nearby is sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden's title was a new one: he was the team's Sensor.

  "What is emotion, Osden?" Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to make some rapport with him for once. "What is it, exactly, that you pick up with your empathic sensitivity?"

  "Muck," the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. "The psychic excreta of the animal kingdom. I wade through your feces."

  "I was trying," she said, "to learn some facts." She thought her tone was admirably calm.

  "You weren't after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some curiosity, and a great deal of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog to see the maggots crawl. Will you understand once and for all that I don't want to be got at, that I want to be left alone?" His skin was mottled with red and violet, his voice had risen. "Go roll in your own dung you yellow bitch!" he shouted at her silence.

  "Calm down," she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin. Of course he had been right about her motives; her question had been largely a pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But what harm in that? Did not that effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question she had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him, the poor arrogant venomous bastard, Mr. No-Skin as Olleroo called him. What did he expect, the way he acted? Love?

  "I guess he can't stand anybody feeling sorry for him," said Olleroo, lying on the lower bunk, gilding her nipples.

  "Then he can't form any human relationship. All his Dr. Hammergeld did was turn an autism inside out … "

  "Poor frot," said Olleroo. "Tomiko, you don't mind if Harfex comes in for a while tonight, do you?"

  "Can't you go to his cabin? I'm sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned peeled turnip."

  "You do hate him, don't you? I guess he feels that. But I slept with Harfex last night too, and Asnanifoil might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It would be nicer here."

  "Service them both," Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran subculture, the East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up chaste.

  "I only like one a night," Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the Garden Planet, had never discovered chastity, or the wheel.

  "Try Osden, then," Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now: a profound self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism. She had volunteered for this job because there was, in all probability, no use in doing it.

  The little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. "Tomiko, that was a dirty thing to say."

  "Why?"

  "It would be vile! I'm not attracted to Osden!"

  "I didn't know it mattered to you," Tomiko said indifferently, though she did know. She got some papers together and left the cabin, remarking "I hope you and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell; I'm tired."

  Olleroo was crying tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily. Tomiko had not wept since she was ten years old.

  It was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his computers raised World 4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched the jade disc grow, a sense of mutuality grew among them. Osden's selfishness, his accurate cruelty, served now to draw the others together. "Perhaps," Mannon said, "he was sent as a beating-gron. What Terrans call a scapegoat Perhaps his influence will be good after all." And no one, so careful were they to be kind to one another, disagreed.

  They came into orbit. There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of the lines and clots made by animals who build.

  "No men," Harfex murmured.

  "Of course not," snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head inside a polythene bag. He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic noise he received from the others. "We're two light centuries past the limit of the Hainish Expansion, and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You don't think Creation would have made the same hideous mistake twice?"

  No one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade immensity below them, where there was life, but not human life. They were misfits among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace. Even Osden did not look quite so expressionless as usual; he was frowning.

  Descent in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like grass, thick, green, bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against extended view cameras, smeared the lenses with a fine pollen.

  "It looks like a pure phytosphere," Harfex said. "Osden, do you pick up anything sentient?"

  They all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup of tea. He did not answer. He seldom answered spoken questions.

  The chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams of mad scientists; their chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary procedure and peck-order, and would have driven a regular service officer out of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, Dr. Haito Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative for the first time. "Mr. Sensor Osden," she said, "please answer Mr. Harfex."

  "How could I 'pick up' anything from outside," Osden said without turning, "with the emotions of nine neurotic hominids pulsating around me like worms in a can? When I have anything to tell you, I’ll tell you. I'm aware of my responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however, Coordinator Haito, I’ll consider my responsibility void."

  "Very well, Mr. Sensor. I trust no orders will be needed henceforth." Tomiko's bullfrog voice was calm, but Osden seemed to flinch slightly as he stood with his back to her, as if the surge of her suppressed rancor had struck him with physical force.

  The biologist's hunch proved correct. When they began field analyses they found no animals even among the microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else. All life-forms were photosynthesizing or saprophagous, living offlight or death, not off life. Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the visitors from the house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown, red. Infinite silences. Only the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm soughing wind laden with spores and pollens, blowing the sweet pale-green dust over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather, flowerless forests where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad and serene, the Surveyors wandering like picknickers over sunny plains of violet filicaliformes, spoke
softly to each other. They knew their voices broke a silence of a thousand million years, the silence of wind and leaves, leaves and wind, blowing and ceasing and blowing again. They talked softly; but being human, they talked.

  "Poor old Osden," said Jenny Chong Bio and Tech, as she piloted a helijet on the North Polar Quadrating run. "All that fancy hi-fi stuff in his brain and nothing to receive. What a bust."

  "He told me he hates plants," Olleroo said with a giggle.

  "You'd think he'd like them, since they don't bother him like we do."

  "Can't say I much like these plants myself," said Porlock, looking down at the purple undulations of the North Circumpolar Forest "All the same. No mind. No change. A man alone in it would go right off his head."

  "But it's all alive," Jenny Chong said. "And if it lives, Osden hates it."

  "He's not really so bad," Olleroo said, magnanimous.

  Porlock looked at her sidelong and asked, "You ever slept with him, Olleroo?" Olleroo burst into tears and cried, "You Terrans are obscene!"

  "No she hasn't," Jenny Chong said, prompt to defend. "Have you, Porlock?"

  The chemist laughed uneasily: ha, ha, ha. Flecks of spittle appeared on his mustache.

  "Osden can't bear to be touched," Olleroo said shakily. "I just brushed against him once by accident and he knocked me off like I was some sort of dirty … thing. We're all just things, to him,"

  "He's evil," Porlock said in a strained voice, startling the two women. "Hell end up shattering this team, sabotaging it, one way or another. Mark my words. He's not fit to live with other people!" They landed on the North Pole. A midnight sun smoldered over low hills. Short, dry, greenish-pink bryoform grasses stretched away in every direction, which was all one direction, south. Subdued by the incredible silence, the three Surveyors set up their instruments and set to work, three viruses twitching minutely on the hide of an unmoving giant

  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 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 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 possible 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 24 o'clock that night, Harfex tol
d 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.

  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?"