Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "It's not the trees," Harfex said. "They have no more nervous system than do plants of the Hainish Descent on Earth. None."

  "You're not seeing the forest for the trees, as they say on Earth," Mannon put in, smiling elfinly; Harfex stared at him. "What about those root-nodes we've been puzzling about for twenty days—eh?"

  "What about them?"

  "They are, indubitably, connections. Connections among the trees. Right? Now let's just suppose, most improbably, that you knew nothing of animal brain-structure. And you were given one axon, or one detached glial cell, to examine. Would you be likely to discover what it was? Would you see that the cell was capable of sentience?"

  "No. Because it isn't. A single cell is capable of mechanical response to stimulus. No more. Are you hypothesizing that individual arboriformes are 'cells' in a kind of brain, Mannon?"

  "Not exactly. I'm merely pointing out that they are all interconnected, both by the root-node linkage and by your green epiphytes in the branches. A linkage of incredible complexity and physical extent. Why, even the prairie grass-forms have those root-connectors, don't they? I know that sentience or intelligence isn't a thing, you can't find it in, or analyze it out from, the cells of a brain. It's a function of the connected cells. It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness. It doesn't exist. I'm not trying to say it exists. I'm only guessing that Osden might be able to describe it."

  And Osden took him up, speaking as if in trance. "Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana."

  "Then why do you receive fear?" Tomiko asked in a low voice.

  "I don't know. I can't see how awareness of objects, of others, could arise: an unperceiving response … But there was an uneasiness, for days. And then when I lay between the two trees and my blood was on their roots—" Osden's face glittered with sweat. "It became fear," he said shrilly, "only fear."

  "If such a function existed," Harfex said, "it would not be capable of conceiving of a self-moving, material entity, or responding to one. It could no more become aware of us than we can 'become aware' of Infinity."

  "'The silence of those infinite expanses terrifies me,'" muttered Tomiko. "Pascal was aware of Infinity. By way of fear."

  "To a forest," Mannon said, "we might appear as forest fires. Hurricanes. Dangers. What moves quickly is dangerous, to a plant. The rootless would be alien, terrible. And if it is mind, it seems only too probable that it might become aware of Osden, whose own mind is open to connection with all others so long as he's conscious, and who was lying in pain and afraid within it, actually inside it. No wonder it was afraid—"

  "Not 'it,'" Harfex said. "There is no being, no huge creature, no person! There could at most be only a function—"

  "There is only a fear," Osden said.

  They were all still a while, and heard the stillness outside.

  "Is that what I feel all the time coming up behind me?" Jenny Chong asked, subdued.

  Osden nodded. "You all feel it, deaf as you are. Eskwana's the worst off, because he actually has some empathic capacity. He could send if he learned how, but he's too weak, never will be anything but a medium."

  "Listen, Osden," Tomiko said, "you can send. Then send to it—the forest, the fear out there—tell it that we won't hurt it. Since it has, or is, some sort of affect that translates into what we feel as emotion, can't you translate back? Send out a message, We are harmless, we are friendly."

  "You must know that nobody can emit a false empathic message, Haito. You can't send something that doesn't exist."

  "But we don't intend harm, we are friendly."

  "Are we? In the forest, when you picked me up, did you feel friendly?"

  "No. Terrified. But that's—it, the forest, the plants, not my own fear, isn't it?"

  "What's the difference? It's all you felt. Can't you see," and Osden's voice rose in exasperation, "why I dislike you and you dislike me, all of you? Can't you see that I retransmit every negative or aggressive affect you've felt towards me since we first met? I return your hostility, with thanks. I do it in self-defense. Like Porlock. It is self-defense, though; it's the only technique I developed to replace my original defense of total withdrawal from others. Unfortunately it creates a closed circuit, self-sustaining and self-reinforcing. Your initial reaction to me was the instinctive antipathy to a cripple; by now of course it's hatred. Can you fail to see my point? The forest mind out there transmits only terror, now, and the only message I can send it is terror, because when exposed to it I can feel nothing except terror!"

  "What must we do, then?" said Tomiko, and Mannon replied promptly, "Move camp. To another continent If there are plant-minds there, they'll be slow to notice us, as this one was; maybe they won't notice us at all."

  "It would be a considerable relief," Osden observed stiffly. The others had been watching him with a new curiosity. He had revealed himself, they had seen him as he was, a helpless man in a trap. Perhaps, like Tomiko, they had seen that the trap itself, his crass and cruel egotism, was their own construction, not his. They had built the cage and locked him in it, and like a caged ape he threw filth out through the bars. If, meeting him, they had offered trust, if they had been strong enough to offer him love, how might he have appeared to them?

  None of them could have done so, and it was too late now. Given time, given solitude, Tomiko might have built up with him a slow resonance of feeling a consonance of trust, a harmony; but there was no time, their job must be done. There was not room enough for the cultivation of so great a thing, and they must make do with sympathy, with pity, the small change of love. Even that much had given her strength, but it was nowhere near enough for him. She could see in his flayed face now his savage resentment of their curiosity, even of her pity.

  "Go lie down, that gash is bleeding again," she said, and he obeyed her.

  Next morning they packed up, melted down the spray-form hangar and living quarters, lifted Gum on mechanical drive and took her halfway round World 4470, over the red and green lands, the many warm green seas. They had picked out a likely spot on continent G: a prairie, twenty thousand square kilos of windswept graminiformes. No forest was within a hundred kilos of the site, and there were no lone trees or groves on the plain. The plant-forms occurred only in large species-colonies, never intermingled, except for certain tiny ubiquitous saprophytes and spore-bearers. The team sprayed holomeld over structure forms, and by evening of the thirty-two-hour day were settled in to the new camp. Eskwana was still asleep and Porlock still sedated, but everyone else was cheerful. "You can breathe here!" they kept saying.

  Osden got on his feet and went shakily to the doorway; leaning there he looked through twilight over the dim reaches of the swaying grass that was not grass. There was a faint, sweet odor of pollen on the wind; no sound but the soft, vast sibilance of wind. His bandaged head cocked a little, the empath stood motionless for a long time. Darkness came, and the stars, lights in the windows of the distant house of Man. The wind had ceased, there was no sound. He listened.

  In the long night Haito Tomiko listened. She lay still and heard the blood in her arteries, the breathing of sleepers, the wind blowing, the dark veins running the dreams advancing the vast static of stars increasing as the universe died slowly, the sound of death walking. She struggled out of her bed, fled the tiny solitude of her cubicle. Eskwana alone slept. Porlock lay straitjacketed, raving softly in his obscure native tongue. Olleroo and Jenny Chong were playing cards, grim-faced. Poswet To was in the therapy niche, plugged in. Asnanifoil was drawing a mandala, the Third Pattern of the Primes. Mannon and Harfex were sitting up with Osden.

  She changed the bandages on Osden's head. His lank, reddish hair, where she had not had to shave it, looked strange. It was salted with white, now. Her hands shook a
s she worked. Nobody had yet said anything.

  "How can the fear be here too?" she said, and her voice rang flat and false in the terrific silence.

  "It's not just the trees; the grasses … "

  "But we're twelve thousand kilos from where we were this morning we left it on the other side of the planet."

  "It's all one," Osden said. "One big green thought. How long does it take a thought to get from one side of your brain to the other?"

  "It doesn't think. It isn't thinking," Harfex said, lifelessly. "It's merely a network of processes. The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctures between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windbome sentience, connecting overseas. But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated … "

  "Isolated," said Osden. "That's it! That's the fear. It isn't that we're motile, or destructive. It's just that we are. We are other. There has never been any other."

  "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.

  "Comeback."

  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 fi
nished 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.