he had blocked out that comprehension. What one fears is alien. The murderer is an outsider, a foreigner, not one of us. The evil is not in me!
"The first blow knocked him pretty well out," Tomiko said a little wearily, "he didn't see anything. But when he came to again, alone in the forest, he felt a great fear. Not his own fear; an empathic effect. He is certain of that And certain it was nothing picked up from any of us. So that evidently the native life-forms are not all insentient"
Harfex looked at her a moment, grim. 'You're trying to frighten me, Haito. I do not understand your motives." He got up and went off to his laboratory table, walking slowly and stiffly, like a man of eighty not of forty.
She looked around at the others. She felt some desperation. Her new, fragile, and profound interdependence with Osden gave her, she was well aware, some added strength. But if even Harfex could not keep his head, who of the others would? Porlock and Eskwana were shut in their cubicles, the others were all working or busy with something. There was something queer about their positions. For a while the Coordinator could not tell what it was, then she saw that they were all sitting facing the nearby forest Playf
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ing chess with Asnanifoil, Olleroo had edged her chair around until it was almost beside his.
She went to Mannon, who was dissecting a tangle of spidery brown roots, and told him to look for the pattern- puzzle. He saw it at once, and said with unusual brevity, "Keeping an eye on the enemy."
"What enemy? What do you feel, Mannon?" She had a sudden hope in him as a psychologist, on this obscure ground of hints and empathies where biologists went astray.
"I feel a strong anxiety with a specific spatial orientation. But I am not an empath. Therefore the anxiety is explicable in terms of the particular stress-situation, that is, the attack on a team member in the forest, and also in terms of the total stress-situation, that is, my presence in a totally alien environment for which the archetypical connotations of the word 'forest' provide an inevitable metaphor."
Hours later Tomiko woke to hear Osden screaming in nightmare; Mannon was calming him, and she sank back into her own dark-branching pathless dreams. In the morning Eskwana did not wake. He could not be roused with stimulant drugs. He clung to his sleep, slipping farther and farther back, mumbling softly now and then until, wholly regressed, he lay curled on his side, thumb at his lips, gone.
"Two days; two down. Ten little Indians, nine little Indians..." That was Porlock
"And you're the next little Indian," Jenny Chong snapped. "Go analyze your urine, Porlock!"
"He is driving us all insane," Porlock said, getting up and waving his left arm. "Can't you feel it? For God's sake, are you all deaf and blind? Can't you feel what he's doing the emanations? It all comes from him -- from his room there -- from his mind. He is driving us all insane with fear! "
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"Who is?" said Asnanifoil, looming precipitous and hairy over the little Terran.
"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
