"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.
12GJ? BUFFALO GALS
/ 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. A
"Comeback." -\\
A wind was rising. "Ill stay here," the soft voice said.
"You can't stay -- "
I<<
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 Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "A.127
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.
12 8-ABUFFALO GALS
Gum returned after many surveys, years, and lighryears, 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)
VI
Seven Bird and Beast Poems
Various real or imaginary relations and comminglings of human and other beings are going on here. The last one is a true ghost story.
The first one is a joke about one of my favorite kinds of bird, the acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus in Latin, boso in Kesh). They are handsome little woodpeckers, still common in Northern California, splendidly marked, with a red cap, and a white circle round the eye giving them a clown's mad stare. They talk all the time -- the loud yacka-yacka-yacka call, and all kinds of mutters, whirs, purrs, comments, criticisms, and gossip going on constantly among the foraging or housekeeping group. They are familial or tribal. Cousins and aunts help a mated pair feed and bring up the babies. Why they make holes and drop acorns into them when they can't get the acorns back out of the holes is still a question (to ornithologists -- not to acorn woodpeckers). When we removed the wasp- and woodpecker-riddled back outer wall of an old California farmhouse last year, about a ton of acorns fell out, all worm-hollowed husks; they had never been accessible to the generations of Bosos who had been diligently dropping them in since 1870 or so. But in the walls of the bam are neat rows of little holes, each one with a longValky Oak acorn stuck in, a perfect fit, almost like rivets in sheet iron. These, presumably, are winter supply. On the other hand, they might be a woodpecker an form. Another funny thing they do is in spring, very early in the morning when a male wants to assert the tribal territory and/or impress the hell out of some redhead.
131
132 JT BUFFALO GALS
He finds a tree that makes a really loud sound, and drums on it. The loudest tree these days -- a fine example of the interfacing of human and woodpecker cultures -- is a metal chimney sticking up from a farmhouse roof. A woodpecker doing the kettledrum reveille on the stovepipe is a real good way to start the day at attention.
Seven Bird and Beast Poems "A-133
What is Going on in The Oaks Around the Barn
The Acorn Woodpeckers are constructing an Implacable Pecking Machine to attack oaks and whack holes to stack acorns in.
They have not perfected
it yet They keep cranking
it up ratchet by ratchet by ratchet each morning
till a Bluejay yells, "SCRAP!" and it all collapses
into black-and-white flaps and flutters and redheads muttering curses in the big, protecting branches.