pity.
"Go lie down, that gash is bleeding again," she said, and he obeyed her.
Next morning they packed up, melted down the spray-form hangar and living quarters, lifted Gum on mechanical drive and took her halfway round World 4470, over the red and green lands, the many warm green seas. They had picked out a likely spot on continent G: a prairie, twenty thousand square kilos of windswept graminiformes. No forest was within a hundred kilos of the site, and there were no lone trees or groves on the plain. The plant-forms occurred only in large species-
colonies, never intermingled, except for certain tiny ubiquitous saprophytes and spore-bearers. The team sprayed holomeld over structure forms, and by evening of the thirty-two-hour day were settled in to the new camp. Eskwana was still asleep and Porlock still sedated, but everyone else was cheerful. "You can breathe here!" they kept saying.
Osden got on his feet and went shakily to the doorway; leaning there he looked through twilight over the dim reaches of the swaying grass that was not grass. There was a faint, sweet odor of pollen on the wind; no sound but the soft, vast sibilance of wind. His bandaged head cocked a little, the empath stood motionless for a long time. Darkness came, and the stars, lights in the windows of the distant house of Man. The wind had ceased, there was no sound. He listened.
122-ABUFFALO GALS
In the long night Haito Tomiko listened. She lay still and heard the blood in her arteries, the breathing of sleepers, the wind blowing, the dark veins running the dreams advancing the vast static of stars increasing as the universe died slowly, the sound of death walking. She struggled out of her bed, fled the tiny solitude of her cubicle.
Eskwana alone slept. Porlock lay straitjacketed, raving softly in his obscure native tongue. Olleroo and Jenny Chong were playing cards, grim-faced. Poswet To was in the therapy niche, plugged in. Asnanifoil was drawing a mandala, the Third Pattern of the Primes. Mannon and Harfex were sitting up with Osden.
She changed the bandages on Osden's head. His lank, reddish hair, where she had not had to shave it, looked strange. It was salted with white, now. Her hands shook as she worked. Nobody had yet said anything
"How can the fear be here too?" she said, and her voice rang flat and false in the terrific silence.
"It's not just the trees; the grasses... "
"But we're twelve thousand kilos from where we were this morning we left it on the other side of the planet"
"It's all one," Osden said. "One big green thought How long does it take a thought to get from one side of your brain to the other?"
"It doesn't think. It isn't thinking" Harfex said, lifelessly. "It's merely a network of processes. The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctures between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windbome sentience, connecting overseas. But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated... "
"Isolated," said Osden. "That's it! That's the fear. It isn't Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "A-123
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."
\7AJT BUFFALO GALS
"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
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "A.125
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.