The contrast of these with the potted plants on the man's left was startling. The latter were of the same size and shape, but bore small, heart-shaped green leaves, and a profusion of flowers in a variety of reds and pinks, the tiny petals of the cup-shaped blossoms curving upward together to make a bouquet that in the case of each plant made it look like a Horn of Plenty made of fine, tinted lace. These gleamed in the sunlight, the soil at their base black from recent watering.
On the pedestal in front of the man was one of the pots with the flower-bearing plants in it. As they approached he stood there, continuing to talk - apparently to it, since there was no one else in sight - in a steady stream of words so run together as to be individually indistinguishable and incomprehensible.
As he did this he slowly, delicately and methodically, one by one, took hold of petals from the blossoms of the plant on the pedestal before him and tore them off, dropping them into the decay-smelling waters of the pond before him.
Hal and Amanda came into the forecourt itself and walked up to him. But he took no notice of them, only went on methodically destroying the plant before him. As the final petal of the last blossom fell to the dark water below, he began stripping and shredding the leaves of the plant, one by one. "Fugga, mugga, shugga... , " he seemed to be muttering.
Understanding woke suddenly in Hal's mind and, turning to Amanda, he saw that the same comprehension had come to her. What the man was intoning was a litany of obscenities, so many times repeated that the syllables of the words had run together to the point where the words themselves had lost all meaning. "Hello," said Amanda clearly, almost in the man's ear.
He took no notice of her. Whether he did not hear, or whether he heard but paid no attention, was impossible to say. His robe was so grimed and worn that Hal had paid little attention to it originally, but now he made out the fact that at some time in the past, the word DESTRUCT! had been painted on it, both front and back.
As they watched, the man finished stripping the last leaves from the flower bush he had been denuding. He fell silent, turned from it, still ignoring Hal and Amanda, and went down to the end of the last of the pots with the stripped branches. He picked this pot up and carefully carried it back into the ruins of the house.
They followed him. He went completely through what had been once the closed rooms of the dwelling, and came out into an open area which was filled with scores of plants in pots like his current burden.
They were in all stages from utterly bare of leaves and flowers through the buds of new leaves and flowers to full-blooming individuals. Still ignoring them, he found a place to set down the pot holding the stripped plant, then went to another part of the area and chose a plant overflowing with blossoms. Carrying this as carefully as he had carried the stripped plant, he went back toward the front of the house, out into the forecourt, and put the blooming plant at the end of the line of those on the left of his pedestal.
He dusted the palms of his hands together as he went back to the pedestal. He lifted on to it the nearest of the row of blooming plants, putting it side by side with the one he had just stripped. Leaving them there, he began moving over, one by one, the other pots of unharmed plants, then the row of bare-limbed ones. Finally, he took the plant he had just stripped and lifted it down into the vacant place now available just to the right of his pedestal.
He straightened up and began stripping the petals from the nearest bloom of the fresh pot before him, dropping the petals into the thick water of the pond. The stream of nonsense syllables came again from his lips. All through the time they had been beside him he had never once shown any awareness of Amanda or Hal. "There's nothing we can do for him," said Amanda. "We might as well go."
They turned away and went on toward the mountains. But gazing at those toward which they traveled it occurred to Hal for the first time that if, as Amanda had said, the edges of the rock forming the valley floor had been uptilted by the molten, interior rock rising from below, then it was very old rock that now essentially plated the new at the base of the mountains. As his mind reached out to conceive of the possible millions of years of difference between the two ages of rocks combined into one single entity that was the range, a strange and unexplainable shiver ran on spider-light feet up his spine. And then was gone.
But the memory of its passing stayed in the back of his mind, even as the image of the man they had just left displaced it in his present thoughts and continued with him as they went. Hal saw the image in his mind, only. There was nothing interfering with his physical eyes, which took automatic note of his surroundings, including the road that now had dwindled to a foot trail of packed earth, and had begun to follow the contours of small, but fairly steep, hills as it continued to work its way upward.
Their surroundings now varied from open patches to heavily forested slopes, both above and below their way. The open spaces were covered with knee-high versions of ferns, and for the first time Hal was conscious of these being stirred by the passage of occasional small animals. He pointed the movement out to Amanda. "Rabbits," said Amanda. "You remember I mentioned them'? The Kultans imported a variform to be farmed for meat protein, for those of the Exotics who weren't on purely vegetarian diets. Some got loose..."
She waved her hand at the forest about them. "They spread over this whole land mass. At any rate, they've turned out to be a boon to the locals as the major source of meat available, and since protein isn't easily got by any but the military, the native population's become meat-eaters out of necessity, to balance their diet."
Hat nodded, and turned his mind to other observations of their surroundings. Procyon was high in the sky above them and the last of the puffs of clouds seemed to have burned away in the heat of the air at this upper altitude. He saw all this, but his thoughts were not on it. He had returned to trying to imagine himself in the mind of the man they had just seen.
This business of imagining himself as being someone else he had met had begun as a game when he had been a child, and grown from there to a practice, and from a practice almost to a compulsion. He had come to count it as a failure when he could not imagine himself seeing all things as any other person might see them.
It was more difficult to put himself in the other's shoes than it would be with almost anyone else. The man was obviously insane. But he should be able to do it with sufficient effort.
He had probably been driven into that state by whatever the Occupation soldiery had done when they destroyed his house, and it was because he was so plainly mad that they had not bothered to move him away from the ruins into the town, since then, as they had with the other Exotics.
Hal focused his inner vision DOW on the thought that it was he himself standing there, plucking the blossoms, destroying the flowers. It was slow... but the image of the scene took shape in his mind's eye at last.
It was always necessary to understand, and to really understand it was necessary to actually feel himself being somebody else. A complete empathy. Empathy was a good word for the process of other-being. Good... and necessary. Complete empathy produced in the end complete responsibility. Complete responsibility became in the end universal and instinctive - an automatic consideration before any action involving other human beings.
With full and instinctive responsibility in all humans, James would not have died, Tam would not now be at the brink of death with three men's deaths still crushingly upon his conscience. Now, to himself, he was the madman, and to him, the destruction of the plants was the destruction of what had destroyed his sanity. Bit by bit, he was trying to balance the books, to climb back to where he had once been. But the path he had chosen was circular. He would never get there.