As her feet touched the forest floor, she unsnapped the flap of her holster; then glancing at Harfex, who was unarmed, she left the gun untouched. But her hand kept coming back to it. There was no sound at all, as soon as they were a few meters away from the slow, brown river, and the light was dim. Great boles stood well apart, almost regularly, almost alike; they were soft-skinned, some appearing smooth and others spongy, grey or greenish-brown or brown, twined with cable-like creepers and festooned with epiphytes, extending rigid, entangled armfuls of big saucer-shaped, dark leaves that formed a roof-layer twenty to thirty meters thick. The ground underfoot was springy as a mattress, every inch of it knotted with roots and peppered with small, fleshy-leafed growths.
"Here's his tent," Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community of the voiceless. In the tent was Osden's sleeping bag, a couple of books, a box of rations. We should be calling shouting for him, she thought, but did not even suggest it; nor did Harfex They circled out from the tent, careful to keep each other in sight through the thick-standing presences, the crowding gloom. She stumbled over Osden's body, not thirty meters from the tent, led to it by the whitish gleam of a dropped notebook. He lay face down between two huge-rooted trees. His head and hands were covered with blood, some dried, some still oozing red.
Harfex appeared beside her, his pale Hainish complexion quite green in the dusk. "Dead?"
"No. He's been struck. Beaten. From behind." Tomiko's fingers felt over the bloody skull and temples and nape. "A weapon or a tool... I don't find a fracture."
As she turned Osden's body over so they could lift him, his eyes opened. She was holding him, bending close to his face. His pale lips writhed. A deathly fear came into her. She screamed aloud two or three times and tried to run away, shambling and stumbling into the terrible dusk. Harfex caught her, and at his touch and the sound of his voice, her panic decreased. "What is it? What is it?" he was saying
"I don't know," she sobbed. Her heartbeat still shook her, and she could not see clearly. "The fear—the... I panicked. When I saw his eyes."
"We're both nervous. I don't understand this—"
"I'm all right now, come on, we've got to get him under care."
Both working with senseless haste, they lugged Osden to the riverside and hauled him up on a rope under his armpits; he dangled like a sack, twisting a little, over the glutinous dark sea of leaves. They pulled him into the helijet and took off. Within a minute they were over open prairie. Tomiko locked onto the homing beam. She drew a deep breath, and her eyes met Harfex's. "I was so terrified I almost fainted. I have never done that"
"I was... unreasonably frightened also," said the Hain-ishman, and indeed he looked aged and shaken. "Not so badly as you. But as unreasonably."
"It was when I was in contact with him, holding him. He seemed to be conscious for a moment"
"Empathy?... I hope he can tell us what attacked him."
Osden, like a broken dummy covered with blood and mud, half lay as they had bundled him into the rear seats in their frantic urgency to get out of the forest
More panic met their arrival at base. The ineffective brutality of the assault was sinister and bewildering. Since Harfex stubbornly denied any possibility of animal life they began speculating about sentient plants, vegetable monsters, psychic projections. Jenny Chong's latent phobia reasserted itself and she could talk about nothing except the Dark Egos which followed people around behind their backs. She and Olleroo and Porlock had been summoned back to base; and nobody was much inclined to go outside.
Osden had lost a good deal of blood during the three or four hours he had lain alone, and concussion and severe contusions had put him in shock and semi-coma. As he came out of this and began running a low fever he called several times for "Doctor," in a plaintive voice: "Doctor Hammergeld..." When he regained full consciousness, two of those long days later, Tomiko called Harfex into his cubicle.
"Osden: can you tell us what attacked you?"
The pale eyes flickered past Harfex's face.
"You were attacked," Tomiko said gently. The shifty gaze was hatefully familiar, but she was a physician, protective of the hurt. "You may not remember it yet Something attacked you. You were in the forest—"
"Ah!" he cried out, his eyes growing bright and his features contorting. "The forest—in the forest—"
"What's in the forest?"
He grasped for breath. A look of clearer consciousness came into his face. After a while he said, "I don't know."
"Did you see what attacked you?" Harfex asked.
"I don't know."
"You remember it now."
"I don't know."
"All our lives may depend on this. You must tell us what you saw!"
"I don't know," Osden said, sobbing with weakness. He was too weak to hide the fact that he was hiding the answer, yet he would not say it. Porlock, nearby, was chewing his pepper-colored mustache as he tried to hear what was going on in the cubicle. Harfex leaned over Osden and said, "You will tell us—" Tomiko had to interfere bodily.
Harfex controlled himself with an effort that was painful to see. He went off silently to his cubicle, where no doubt he took a double or triple dose of tranquilizers. The other men and women scattered about the big frail building a long main hall and ten sleeping-cubicles, said nothing, but looked depressed and edgy. Osden, as always, even now, had them all at his mercy. Tomiko looked down at him with a rush of hatred that burned in her throat like bile. This monstrous egotism that fed itself on others' emotions, this absolute selfishness, was worse than any hideous deformity of the flesh. Like a congenital monster, he should not have lived. Should not be alive. Should have died. Why had his head not been split open?
As he lay flat and white, his hands helpless at his sides, his colorless eyes were wide open, and there were tears running from the comers. He tried to flinch away. "Don't," he said in a weak hoarse voice, and tried to raise his hands to protect his head. "Don't!"
She sat down on the folding-stool beside the cot, and after a while put her hand on his. He tried to pull away, but lacked the strength.
A long silence fell between them.
"Osden," she murmured, "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I will you well. Let me will you well, Osden. I don't want to hurt you. Listen, I do see now. It was one of us. That's right, isn't it No, don't answer, only tell me if I'm wrong; but I'm not... Of course there are animals on this planet Ten of them. I don't care who it was. It doesn't matter, does it. It could have been me, just now. I realize that I didn't understand how it is, Osden. You can't see how difficult it is for us to understand ... But listen. If it were love, instead of hate and fear... It is never love?"
"No."
"Why not? Why should it never be? Are human beings all so weak? That is terrible. Never mind, never mind, don't worry. Keep still. At least right now it isn't hate, is it? Sympathy at least, concern, well-wishing, you do feel that, Osden? Is it what you feel?"
"Among... other things," he said, almost inaudibly.
"Noise from my subconscious, I suppose. And everybody else in the room... Listen, when we found you there in the forest, when I tried to turn you over, you partly wakened, and I felt a horror of you. I was insane with fear for a minute. Was that your fear of me I felt?"
"No."
Her hand was still on his, and he was quite relaxed, sinking towards sleep, like a man in pain who has been given relief from pain. "The forest," he muttered; she could barely understand him. "Afraid."
She pressed him no further, but kept her hand on his and watched him go to sleep. She knew what she felt, and what therefore he must feel. She was confident of it there is only one emotion, or state of being that can thus wholly reverse itself, polarize, within one moment In Great Hainish indeed there is one word, onto, for love and for hate. She was not in love with Osden, of course, that was another kettle of fish. What she felt for him was onto, polarized hate. She held his hand and the current flowed between them, the tremendous electricity of touch, which he had always dreaded. As he slept the ring of anatomy-chart muscles around his mouth relaxed, and Tomiko saw on his face what none of them had ever seen, very faint, a smile. It faded. He slept on.
He was tough; next day he was sitting up, and hungry. Harfex wished to interrogate him, but Tomiko put him off. | She hung a sheet of polythene over the cubicle door, as | Osden himself had often done. "Does it actually cut down | your empathic reception?" she asked, and he replied, in the dry, cautious tone they were now using to each other, "No."
"Just a warning then."
"Partly. More faith-healing Dr. Hammergeld thought it worked . . . Maybe it does, a little."
There had been love, once. A terrified child, suffocating in the tidal rush and battering of the huge-emotions of adults, a? drowning child, saved by one man. Taught to breathe, to live, by one man. Given everything, all protection and love, by one man. Father/Mother/God: no other. "Is he still alive?" Tomiko asked, thinking of Osden's incredible loneliness, and the strange cruelty of the great doctors. She was shocked when she heard his forced, tinny laugh. "He died at least two and a half centuries ago," Osden said. "Do you forget where we are, Coordinator? We've all left our little families behind..."