The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

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
gasped 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
tranquillizers. 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' emotion, 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 corners. 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 ... Is it 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, onta, for
love and for