Suddenly again not themselves, not aware of water, but feeling only as the Being, moving a weighty body: stop and start: the sound of motions echoing back from metal walls again. Fear and thought growing louder, louder—
They all knew when he landed.
It was a wind shriek, a spinning. Terror. A flash of pain—
It had been too loud, too possessing. When it stopped it left a feeling like deep silence. Across the world all feeling was blank and bleached. On the high slopes, things like pines felt the drumming of rain as faint and unimportant.
Should the small plants of the foothills put out buds, expecting the groundwater to reach and feed them? Memory came from the western continent, on the other side of the world. On the foothills and plains in the wet season we budded; the rains were short; they stopped and dry winds came, and the buds and shoots died, and branches dried and cracked. The massed memory was weaker than earlier memories, for many lives were missing and produced no memory. Memory of drying and its pain was felt at the tips of growing shoots, and slowed the growth of the soft green. Doubt. The cloud pattern, the night cold, the warm wind, and the pressure of snow blankets still over the bushes of high cold slopes . . . would it be safe to grow, expecting water?
A crash of sensation. Wrong, unplant sensation! All the world became the feeling of being in a heavy body pressing on smooth surfaces, pressure against the face. Bells! loud, ringing alarm bells.
Fear and effort, quickly down the ladder, moving too fast, (unrooted!) falling. Pain—pain, blinding sunlight, sharp-focus violet shadows, green underfoot, odd smell of air—move faster!
Plants were blinded and confused by the wave of intensity. Forest fire? Blinding broken sensation, hot but no, not fire, broken stem, and the effort to move from dry-earth toward water-safety? effort stretching tendrils, extending vine, to start and stop the inert self in sudden growth across the grass. No, not growth, roots do not remain rooted or stay behind; all-self moves together with a heavy thudding swing like wind: gusting and swaying branches in a storm; AND pain, brokenness coming through into them, a wave of the same message striking outward with every thudding step. Broken, broken.
The world of plants writhed with his pain, the grating conviction of being broken. Suddenly there was a flare of light across the grassland, a vast metallic crash, and the man pitched forward on his face, cradling his head protectively in his arms. The pain and brightness turned dark and vanished.
The whispery, almost silent voices of the plants conferred, barely able to share each other’s unobtrusive responses and memories after the blare of the new being’s experiences.
“It died.”
“It died.”
“We are glad it died. Its living hurt.”
“It should have died sooner.”
“We once hurt with the pain of a place scorched by fire. The scorched plants hurt us. We thought of drying and a dry wind, of closing and not growing . . . when we thought to them, and they dried and were silent. Then we did not feel their pain. It was gone.”
“Did we do that again?”
“Did we think dry and make the loud thing stop?”
“When we do not feel sick things, we feel only health and growing, the rain and sun and sweet taste of air frothing in the juice.”
The man began to awake. Darkness and the pressure of ground against his length, the pressure of ground and grass against hid face.
“Don’t return,” the plants thought, willing strongly together. “Stay dark.” And they feared together the return of pain.
“Darkness,” thought the man. “Sleep, avoid returning to pain.” He sank back into nothingness and nonbroadcast.
The plants felt pleasure and health, and the warm comfort of spring winds, and the new reassurance of silence.
Suddenly the man awoke, an explosion of thought. Don't need sleep. Must splint my arm. Must signal for help. Pain pain! coming in intense waves, mastered and made unimportant by the decision to act.
“Pain,” thought the plant world, deciding. “Pain will be ended by making dryness, non-growth, death. Death ends pain.” Pain reached around the world in surges, throbbing, flowing into the channels of that thought, making it huge and powerful, making memory of how to think pain into death into huge amplified images. The hysterical thought-voice of the plant world screamed: “Die! You hurt. Die!”
“Die!” screamed the bushes. “Die, wither, whiten, let your sap not rise to your twigs. Dry up, cease to know and feel.”
“Die” screamed the flowers. “You are hurting us with your broken stem!”
The man lifted his eyes from fastening a telescope splint to his wrist.
“Die!'’ silently screamed the grass, waving hatefully in the wind. “Whither! Cease to feel! Stop hurting!”
“Going crazy,” muttered the man. “I hate that—what is it?—grass? How can I hate grass?”
His shoulder was already circled by the loop at the other end of the splint. Sitting, the man bent both legs, set a boot against the hook at the end of the wrist splint, and pushed outward, stretching the arm until the bones slipped back into a straight line as if they were unbroken. The splint clicked and remained at its stretched length
as his boot slipped out of the hook. He fell back against the grass and looked at the sky. He did not faint, but the waves of pain oddly surged and changed into hate and a great decision to act, to do something about his pain.
Do what? Something alive was making this pain, he must make the thing stop. Crazy thought—a broken arm was just a broken arm—no thing could . . .
Pain wiped out the thought. The plain seemed still to heave like a rolling surf, but he staggered to his feet and glared defiantly around in a circle.
“Die!" screamed the grass.
“Die!" screamed the flowers.
“Die—death,” remembered bushes and trees. “Drought ... broken branches ... forest fires.”
“Strange idea,” muttered the man “Hate that grass. Hate that forest over there. Wish it would bum up. Hate this whole planet. Making my arm hurt. Looking at them makes my arm hurt.”
He put his good hand over his eyes, shutting out the view. “Must stay rational. Can’t go crazy. Must signal for help. They’ll rescue me soon.”
Concentrating, he searched inside himself for rationality, for philosophy, for calm and peace.
“Yes—peace and silence—we want itP' screamed the flowers. “Die, hateful brother, and there will be peace”
“Die. Kill.” When the man lifted his head and looked around, his eyes were despairing and mad. He pulled out a laser pistol clumsily with his good hand, set it to WIDE and pointed it at the nearest grass.
“Wither," screamed the grass. “Stop hurting sentience with your broken stem"
“Die,” muttered the man. He pressed the trigger and a spray of fire took the grass. “Stop hurting my arm,” he muttered. He spun and burned a swath across the grassy growths on the other side and walked onto the black charred ground while it still smoked.
“That’ll show you, you rats,” he said, swaying drunkenly.
“Hurt, stop, hurt. Die. Stop,” screamed the planet of plants. And, slowly aroused and awake, the deep and ancient things like pines added their memories of the death of trees. “Fire . . . avalanche . . . lightning . . . thirst . . .” they remembered in slow thunder across the moth-like thoughts of the smaller plants.
The man swayed under the impact. He took another step toward the distant forest, widened the setting of the laser pistol still further and held the trigger down.
When the rescue ship arrived they traced him easily by the black trail across the green new world, and the red and smoky forest fires rolling away from his black highway of ashes.
They set the ship down in the char, and manhandled him aboard. Once they had him under heavy sedation, plant-thoughts came through again: die . . . stop . . . hurt...
He pounded his image in the mirror until the sap ran from his wrists and jugular, quite a
lot of it, and the plant-thoughts stilled.
Anne McCaffrey is a career woman; her occupation: housewife. Science fiction readers should band together to keep her happily married, so that she'll still manage to find time to produce such stories as the novel, Dragon-rider, and the following...
THE GREAT CANINE CHORUS
Anne McCaffrey
Pete Roberts of the Wilmington, Delaware K-9 Corps has as his partner a German shepherd named Wizard. One night, just after they took the beat, Wizard started acting itchy, nervous, whining. He was snappish, not like himself at all. He kept trying to pull Pete towards 7th Street.
That wasn’t the beat, as Wiz well knew. But Pete decided there might be a good reason. Wizard was a canny dog; he could pick a culprit out of a crowd by the smell of fear the man exuded. And he’d saved Pete from two muggings already this year. So, protesting, Pete let Wizard lead him to that block of buildings being torn down in the urban renewal program.
Wizard became more and more impatient with Pete’s apprehensive, measured pace and tried to tug him into a jog. Pete began to feel worried; kind of sickly scared. Suddenly the dog mounted the worn staircase of one of the buildings about to be demolished. He pawed at the door, whining.
Who’s that? a voice asked, high and quavering like an old lady’s. Pa? It couldn’t be too old a female, then.
Wizard barked sharply three times in the negative signal he’d been taught.
Hi, dog. Do you see my Pa?
Wiz got down from the steps, looked up and down the street, then barked again three times.
Pa’s so late, and I’m so hungry, the voice said.
Pete, who had eaten well an hour earlier, was suddenly overwhelmed with hunger—the sullen kind of stomach cramp that he’d experienced in Korea when his unit was cut off for four days. The kind of griping pangs you get when you’re hungry all the time.
“Lady, I’m going down to the deli on the comer. I’ll he right back with something to tide you over till your Pa gets back.” Pete made the announcement before he realized it. He left Wizard on guard at the door.
He ordered a sub with no onions (somehow he knew ‘no onions’), two cokes and a banana.
I’m in the back room, said the voice when he and Wizard entered the hall.
Pete had had the distinct impression the voice had come from the front of the building. The tone was too thin to have carried far.
The stench of the filthy hall sickened Pete. No matter how many years he might spend on the force, he’d never get used to the odor of poverty. Maybe it was the stink that brought a growl from Wizard.
Pete pushed open the back door and entered the pitifully furnished room. On an old armchair by the window was a wasted little figure, like a broken doll thrown down by a careless child, limbs askew. By now he expected a girl, a child, but this was such a little girl!
Wizard got down on his belly, licking his lips nervously. He crawled carefully across the dirty floor. He sniffed at the tiny hand on the shabby arm of the chair, whined softly. The little hand did not move away, nor toward him, either.
What kind of a father, Pete fumed to himself, would leave a kid, a mere baby, alone in a place like this?
I’m no baby, mister. I’m nine years old, she informed him indignantly.
Pete apologized contritely, blaming his error on the glare from the single window. He wouldn’t have thought her more than five, six at the outside. She was so pitifully underdeveloped. She was clean as were her shred of a dress and the old blanket on which she lay, but the rest of the room was filthy. Her pinched face had a curious, calm beauty to it. When Pete knelt beside her, he saw her eyes were filmed and sightless. And when she spoke, her mouth did not move.
He found himself breaking off small pieces of the sub and feeding them to her. She sipped the Coke through the straw and a look of intense pleasure crossed her face.
I knew l remembered how wonderful it tasted, she said. But not with her lips.
The truth dawned on Pete: this child was a telepath. Impossible?—he hadn’t actually believed any of that crap. But there was no other explanation.
“You aren’t talking,” he said. “You don’t make a sound.”
I am too talking, answered the child soundlessly. And you're answering.
Pete gulped, hastily trying to mend matters. “You just don’t speak the usual way.”
I do everything kind of different. At least my Pa’s always complaining I do. Her head turned slowly towards him. You don’t suppose something’s happened to Pa, do you? I can’t hear very far away when I’m hungry.
Pete fed her another bite guiltily. “When did you eat last?”
Pa was home this morning. But all we had was bread.
Pete vowed to himself passionately that he was going to see Welfare immediately.
Oh, you mustn't! pleaded the soundless voice. Wizard, ears flattened, growling menacingly at Pete. She was clearly frightened of Welfare. They’d take me away, like they took my sister, and put me in a barred place and I'd neve hear any birds or see Pa. They might cut me up 'cause my body doesn’t work right. She still spoke without sound.
“Aw, honey...”
My name’s Maria, not honey.
“Maria, you’ve got it all wrong. Wizard, you tell her. Welfare helps people. You’d have a clean bed and birds right outside the window.”
It’d be a hospital. My Ma died m a hospital because no one cared. Pa said so. They just let her die.
Wizard whimpered. Pete was frightened himself. He soothed Maria as best he could with promises of no hospitals, no cutting, plenty of birds. What she didn’t finish of the sandwich, he wrapped it up and put beside her. He started to peel the banana for her but she refused it.
It’s a treat for Wiz for bringing you here. She laughed. He listens to people.
Pete grinned.
“How on earth did you know that fool dog loves bananas?”
Nothing could have been funnier to Maria and her laughter was so contagious Pete grinned foolishly. Even Wizard laughed in his canine way, his tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth. Suddenly the atmosphere changed.
I hear Pa coming. You’d better leave. He wouldn’t like having the fuzz in here.
“Then why did you let me in?”
Wizard. Dogs always know. I talk to dogs all the time. But I’ve never talked to one as smart as Wizard before. You get out now. Quick.
Pete felt a violent compulsion to take to his heels. Once they were around the corner the impulse vanished, so he waited a few moments and then peered around the building. He saw a shambling figure go into the house where they had found Maria.
Pete was shaken by his encounter with the girl: shaken, confused and frightened. She had taken him over, used him to suit her needs and then cut him off in fear when all he wanted to do was help her. He worried about her all the way round to the hospital: her pitiful life in those awful surroundings . . . and that Strange talent.
He had a friend, a drinking buddy, who was interning at Delaware Hospital. Pete came in that night and found
Joe Lavelle on duty in the emergency ward, so he told Joe a little about the girl. “And what’s going to become of her, living like that?”
“I’d say she was dead already and didn’t know it,” Joe snorted.
The thought of Maria dead choked Pete up. Her fragile laugh, her curious calm beauty gone? No!
“Hey, Pete!” The interne watched the cop’s gut reaction with amazement. “I was only kidding. Why, I couldn’t even guess what was wrong with her without an examination. She could have had polio, meningitis, m. s., any variety of paralysis. But I’d say she needed treatment, fast. And I’d certainly like to see this kid who can make any stalwart defender of this one-horse town quake in his boots like that.”
Pete growled and Wizard seconded it.
Joe warded off an imaginary attack with his arm, laughing, just as the phone rang for him. Pete resumed his patrol.
The next morning, resolved to h
elp Maria in spite of herself, he bought a frilly dress, bundled it and food and Wizard into his car and went back to the house. He ‘called’ to let her know he was coming.
There was no answer. The back room was deserted. Except for the de-stuffed armchair by the window and two Coke bottles on the floor under it, Pete could have sworn no one had been in the house for months.
“Find Maria, Wiz,” Pete ordered.
Wizard hunted around, sniffing, and with a yelp raced out the door. He sniffed around outside and seemed to find a trace. Pete followed him in the car. Wizard acted just as if he knew exactly where he was going. He got half way down the next block then stopped as though he had run into an invisible wall. He lay down on the sidewalk, put his head on his paws and whined. Then he slunk back to Pete at the curb.
“Find her, Wizard!” Pete commanded. The dog crouched down and laid his ears back. It was the first time he had ever disobeyed that tone of voice.
“Maria! We’re your friends! We want to help!” Pete shouted, oblivious to stares. He was sure she could hear him. He waited, apprehensive, unsure.
No! came the one disembodied word, filling his skull til his head rang. There was no arguing it.
“At least tell Wiz if you’re hungry, Maria. He can bring you food. I promise I won’t follow.”
Twice in the next three weeks, Wizard darted into a deli, whining pathetically. It took Pete a minute or so the first time to grasp what the big dog wanted. Then he’d get a sandwich and a Coke-to-go, put it in a bag, roll the top into a handle for Wiz to carry. Then he’d wait til the dog returned. He was determined to prove to Maria he’d keep his promise. He didn’t want to lose contact with her.
In the meantime he did a little judicious research on telepathy at the library, but the textbooks were too much for him. When he asked the librarian for something a guy could understand, he was shown the science fiction shelves.
Infinity One Page 5