The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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 sprayform 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 as 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 too . . .”

  “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 windborne 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 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 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 soft 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.

  BUFFALO GALS,

  WON’T YOU

  COME OUT TONIGHT

  I

  “YOU FELL OUT OF THE sky,” the coyote said.

  Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt.

  “There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it,” the coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. “Are you hurt?”

  She was all right. She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn’t understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her feel sick, but it was all right. They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane.

  She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick. The dark tear-line from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat’s.

  She sat up, slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye.

  “Did you lose an eye?” the coyote asked, interested.

  “I don’t know,” the child said. She caught her breath and shivered. “I’m cold.”

  “I’ll help you look for it,” the coyote said. “Come on! If you move around you won’t have to shiver. The sun’s up.”

  Cold lonely brightness lay across the falling land, a hundred miles of sagebrush. The coyote was trotting busily around, nosing under clumps of rabbit-brush and cheatgrass, pawing at a rock. “Aren’t you going to look?” it said, suddenly sitting down on its haunches and abandoning the search. “I knew a trick once where I could throw my eyes way up into a tree and see everything from up there, and then whistle, and they’d come back into my head. But that goddam bluejay stole them, and when I whistled nothing came. I had to stick lumps of pine pitch into my head so I could see anything. You could try that. But you’ve got one eye that’s okay, what do you need two for? Are you coming, or are you dying there?”

  The child crouched, shivering.

  “Well, come if you want to,” said the coyote, yawned again, snapped at a flea, stood up, turned, and trotted away among the sparse clumps of rabbit-brush and sage, along the long slope that stretched on down and down into the plain streaked across by long shadows of sagebrush. The slender, grey-yellow animal was hard to keep in sight, vanishing as the child watched.

  She struggled to her feet, and without a word, though she kept saying in her mind, “Wait, please wait,” she hobbled after the coyote. She could not see it. She kept her hand pressed over the right eyesocket. Seeing with one eye there was no depth; it was like a huge, flat picture. The coyote suddenly sat in the middle of the picture, looking back at her, its mouth open, its eyes narrowed, grinning. Her legs began to steady and her head did not pound so hard, though the deep, black ache was always there. She had nearly caught up to the coyote when it trotted off again. This time she spoke. “Please wait!” she said.

  “Okay,” said the coyote, but it trotted right on. She followed, walking downhill into the flat picture that at each step was deep.

  Each step was different underfoot; each sage bush was different, and all the same. Following the coyote she came out from the shadow of t
he rimrock cliffs, and the sun at eyelevel dazzled her left eye. Its bright warmth soaked into her muscles and bones at once. The air, that all night had been so hard to breathe, came sweet and easy.

  The sage bushes were pulling in their shadows and the sun was hot on the child’s back when she followed the coyote along the rim of a gully. After a while the coyote slanted down the undercut slope and the child scrambled after, through scrub willows to the thin creek in its wide sandbed. Both drank.

  The coyote crossed the creek, not with a careless charge and splashing like a dog, but singlefoot and quiet like a cat; always it carried its tail low. The child hesitated, knowing that wet shoes make blistered feet, and then waded across in as few steps as possible. Her right arm ached with the effort of holding her hand up over her eye. “I need a bandage,” she said to the coyote. It cocked its head and said nothing. It stretched out its forelegs and lay watching the water, resting but alert. The child sat down nearby on the hot sand and tried to move her right hand. It was glued to the skin around her eye by dried blood. At the little tearing-away pain, she whimpered; though it was a small pain it frightened her. The coyote came over close and poked its long snout into her face. Its strong, sharp smell was in her nostrils. It began to lick the awful, aching blindness, cleaning and cleaning with its curled, precise, strong, wet tongue, until the child was able to cry a little with relief, being comforted. Her head was bent close to the grey-yellow ribs, and she saw the hard nipples, the whitish belly-fur. She put her arm around the she-coyote, stroking the harsh coat over back and ribs.

  “Okay,” the coyote said, “let’s go!” And set off without a backward glance. The child scrambled to her feet and followed. “Where are we going?” she said, and the coyote, trotting on down along the creek, answered, “On down along the creek . . .”

  THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A while she was asleep while she walked, because she felt like she was waking up, but she was walking along, only in a different place. She didn’t know how she knew it was different. They were still following the creek, though the gully was flattened out to nothing much, and there was still sagebrush range as far as the eye could see. The eye—the good one—felt rested. The other one still ached, but not so sharply, and there was no use thinking about it. But where was the coyote?