Infinity One by Robert Hoskins (Ed.) Read Free Book Online Page B

a weighty body: stop and start: the sound of motions echoing back from metal walls again. Fear and thought growing louder, louder—
    They all knew when he landed.
    It was a wind shriek, a spinning. Terror. A flash of pain—
    It had been too loud, too possessing. When it stopped it left a feeling like deep silence. Across the world all feeling was blank and bleached. On the high slopes, things like pines felt the drumming of rain as faint and unimportant.
    Should the small plants of the foothills put out buds, expecting the groundwater to reach and feed them? Memory came from the western continent, on the other side of the world. On the foothills and plains in the wet season we budded; the rains were short; they stopped and dry winds came, and the buds and shoots died, and branches dried and cracked. The massed memory was weaker than earlier memories, for many lives were missing and produced no memory. Memory of drying and its pain was felt at the tips of growing shoots, and slowed the growth of the soft green. Doubt. The cloud pattern, the night cold, the warm wind, and the pressure of snow blankets still over the bushes of high cold slopes . . . would it be safe to grow, expecting water?
    A crash of sensation. Wrong, unplant sensation! All the world became the feeling of being in a heavy body pressing on smooth surfaces, pressure against the face. Bells! loud, ringing alarm bells.
    Fear and effort, quickly down the ladder, moving too fast, (unrooted!) falling. Pain—pain, blinding sunlight, sharp-focus violet shadows, green underfoot, odd smell of air—move faster!
    Plants were blinded and confused by the wave of intensity. Forest fire? Blinding broken sensation, hot but no, not fire, broken stem, and the effort to move from dry-earth toward water-safety? effort stretching tendrils, extending vine, to start and stop the inert self in sudden growth across the grass. No, not growth, roots do not remain rooted or stay behind; all-self moves together with a heavy thudding swing like wind: gusting and swaying branches in a storm; AND pain, brokenness coming through into them, a wave of the same message striking outward with every thudding step. Broken, broken.
    The world of plants writhed with his pain, the grating conviction of being broken. Suddenly there was a flare of light across the grassland, a vast metallic crash, and the man pitched forward on his face, cradling his head protectively in his arms. The pain and brightness turned dark and vanished.
    The whispery, almost silent voices of the plants conferred, barely able to share each other’s unobtrusive responses and memories after the blare of the new being’s experiences.
    “It died.”
    “It died.”
    “We are glad it died. Its living hurt.”
    “It should have died sooner.”
    “We once hurt with the pain of a place scorched by fire. The scorched plants hurt us. We thought of drying and a dry wind, of closing and not growing . . . when we thought to them, and they dried and were silent. Then we did not feel their pain. It was gone.”
    “Did we do that again?”
    “Did we think dry and make the loud thing stop?”
    “When we do not feel sick things, we feel only health and growing, the rain and sun and sweet taste of air frothing in the juice.”

    The man began to awake. Darkness and the pressure of ground against his length, the pressure of ground and grass against hid face.
    “Don’t return,” the plants thought, willing strongly together. “Stay dark.” And they feared together the return of pain.
    “Darkness,” thought the man. “Sleep, avoid returning to pain.” He sank back into nothingness and nonbroadcast.
    The plants felt pleasure and health, and the warm comfort of spring winds, and the new reassurance of silence.

    Suddenly the man awoke, an explosion of thought. Don't need sleep. Must splint my arm. Must signal for help. Pain pain! coming in intense waves, mastered and made unimportant by the decision to act.

    “Pain,” thought the