Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences Read online

  "Do I have to say his name? Osden, then. Osden! Osden! Why do you think I tried to kill him? In self-defense! To save all of us! Because you won't see what he's doing to us. He's sabotaged the mission by making us quarrel, and now he's going to drive us all insane by projecting fear at us so that we can't sleep or mink, like a huge radio that doesn't make any sound, but it broadcasts all the time, and you can't sleep, and you can't think. Haito and Harfex are already under his control but the rest of you can be saved. I had to do it!"

  'You didn't do it very well," Osden said, standing half-naked, all rib and bandage, at the door of his cubicle. "I could have hit myself harder. Hell, it isn't me that's scaring you blind, Porlock, it's out there -- there, in the woods!"

  Porlock made an ineffectual attempt to assault Osden; Asnanifoil held him back, and continued to hold him effortlessly while Mannon gave him a sedative shot He was put away shouting about giant radios. In a minute the sedative took effect, and he joined a peaceful silence to Eskwana's.

  "All right," said Harfex. "Now, Osden, you'll tell us what you know and all you know."

  Osden said, "I don't know anything"

  He looked battered and faint Tomiko made him sit down before he talked.

  "After I'd been three days in the forest, I thought I was occasionally receiving some kind of affect"

  "Why didn't you report it?"

  "Thought I was going spla, like the rest of you."

  "That, equally, should have been reported."

  "You'd have called me back to base. I couldn't take it You realize that my inclusion in the mission was a bad mistake. I'm not able to coexist with nine other neurotic

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  personalities at close quarters. I was wrong to volunteer for Extreme Survey, and the Authority was wrong to accept me."

  No one spoke; but Tomiko saw, with certainty this time, the flinch in Osden's shoulders and the tightening of his facial muscles, as he registered their bitter agreement

  "Anyhow, I didn't want to come back to base because I was curious. Even going psycho, how could I pick up empathic effects when there was no creature to emit them? They weren't bad, then. Very vague. Queer. Like a draft in a closed room, a flicker in the corner of your eye. Nothing really.”

  For a moment he had been borne up on their listening: they heard, so he spoke. He was wholly at their mercy. If they disliked him he had to be hateful; if they mocked him he became grotesque; if they listened to him he was the storyteller. He was helplessly obedient to the demands of their emotions, reactions, moods. And there were seven of them, too many to cope with, so that he must be constantly knocked about from one to another's whim. He could not find coherence. Even as he spoke and held them, somebody's attention would wander Olleroo perhaps was thinking that he wasn't unattractive, Harfex was seeking the ulterior motive of his words, Asnanifoil's's mind, which could not be long held by the concrete, was roaming off towards the eternal peace of number, and Tomiko was distracted by pity, by fear. Osden's voice faltered. He lost the thread. "I... I thought it must be the trees,” he said, and stopped.

  "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 weVe been puzzling about for twenty days -- eh?"

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  "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

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  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"

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  "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 observedi stiffly. The others had been watching him with a new curij f osity. 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?

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  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.

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  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... "

  "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 Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "A-123

  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 tele-ological, 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."

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  "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

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  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.

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  / 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.