"Isolated," said Osden. "That's it! That's the fear. It isn't 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."
"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 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.
"I 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.
It ceased.
She raised her head; slowly unclenched her hands. She sat up straight The night was dark, and stars shone over the forest There was nothing else.
"Osden," she said, but her voice would not come. She spoke again, louder, a lone bullfrog croak. There was no reply.
She began to realize that something had gone wrong with Harfex. She was trying to find his head in the darkness, for he had slipped down from the seat, when all at once, in the dead quiet, in the dark rear compartment of the craft, a voice spoke. "Good," it said. It was Eskwana's voice. She snapped on the interior lights and saw the engineer lying curled up asleep, his hand half over his mouth.
The mouth opened and spoke. "All well," it said.
"Osden—"
"All well," said the voice from Eskwana's mouth.
"Where are you?"
Silence.
"Comeback."
A wind was rising. "I'll stay here," the soft voice said.
"You can't stay—"
Silence.
"You'd be alone, Osden!"
"Listen." The voice was fainter, slurred, as if lost in the sound of wind. "Listen. I will you well."
She called his name after that, but there was no answer. Eskwana lay still. Harfex lay stiller.
"Osden!" she cried, leaning out the doorway into the dark, wind-shaken silence of the forest of being. "I will come back. I must get Harfex to the base. I will come back, Osden!"
Silence and wind in leaves.
They finished the prescribed survey of World 4470, the eight of them; it took them forty-one days more. Asnanifoil and one or another of the women went into the forest daily at first, searching for Osden in the region around the bare knoll, though Tomiko was not in her heart sure which bare knoll they had landed on that night in the very heart and vortex of terror. They left piles of supplies for Osden, food enough for fifty years, clothing tents, tools. They did not go on searching there was no way to find a man alone, hiding if he wanted to hide, in those unending labyrinths and dim corridors vine-entangled, root-floored. They might have passed within arm's reach of him and never seen him.
But he was there; for there was no fear any more. Rational, and valuing reason more highly after an intolerable experience of the immortal mindless, Tomiko tried to understand rationally what Osden had done. But the words escaped her control. He had taken the fear into himself, and, accepting had transcended it He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.—But this is not the vocabulary of reason.
The people of the Survey team walked under the trees, through the vast colonies of life, surrounded by a dreaming silence, a brooding calm that was half aware of them and wholly indifferent to them. There were no hours. Distance was no matter. Had we but world enough and time... The planet turned between the sunlight and the great dark; winds of winter and summer blew fine, pale pollen across the quiet seas.
Gum returned after many surveys, years, and lightyears, to what had several centuries ago been Smeming Port There were still men there, to receive (incredulously) the team's reports, and to record its losses: Biologist Harfex, dead of fear, and Sensor Osden, left as a colonist.
(1971)