"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
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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
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow *al 99
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 Hanish 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
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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, 111 tell you. I'm aware of my responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however, Coordinator Haito, 111 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
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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 Cir-cumpolar 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?"
