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

hate. She was not in love with Osden, of course, that was another
kettle of fish. What she felt for him was onta, polarized
hate. She held his hand and the current flowed between them, the tremendous
electricity of touch, which he had always dreaded. As he slept the ring of
anatomy-chart muscles around his mouth relaxed, and Tomiko saw on his face what
none of them had ever seen, very faint, a smile. It faded. He slept on.
    He
was tough; next day he was sitting up, and hungry. Harfex wished to interrogate
him, but Tomiko put him off. She hung a sheet of polythene over the cubicle
door, as Osden himself had often done. 'Does it actually cut down your empathic
reception?' she asked, and he replied, in the dry, cautious tone they were now
using to each other, 'No.'
    'Just
a warning, then.'
    'Partly.
More faith-healing. Dr Hammergeld thought it worked ... Maybe it does, a
little.'
    There
had been love, once. A terrified child, suffocating in the tidal rush and
battering of the huge emotions of adults, a drowning child, saved by one man.
Taught to breathe, to live, by one man. Given everything, all protection and
love, by one man. Father/Mother/God: no other. 'Is he still alive? Tomiko
asked, thinking of Osden's incredible loneliness, and the strange cruelty of
the great doctors. She was shocked when she heard his forced, tinny laugh. 'He
died at least two and a half centuries ago,' Osden said. 'Do you forget where
we are, Coordinator? We've all left our little families behind...'
    Outside
the polythene curtain the eight other human beings on World 4470 moved vaguely.
Their voices were low and strained. Eskwana slept; Poswet To was in therapy;
Jenny Chong was trying to rig lights in her cubicle so that she wouldn't cast a
shadow.
    'They're
all scared,' Tomiko said, scared. 'They've all got these ideas about what
attacked you. A sort of ape-potato, a giant fanged spinach, I don't know...
Even Harfex. You may be right not to force them to see. That would be worse, to
lose confidence in one another. But why are we all so shaky, unable to face the
fact, going to pieces so easily? Are we really all insane?'
    'We'll
soon be more so.'
    'Why?'
    'There is something.'
He closed his mouth, the muscles of his lips stood out rigid. 'Something
sentient?'
    'A
sentience.'
    'In
the forest?' He nodded. 'What is it, then—?'
    'The
fear.' He began to look strained again, and moved restlessly. 'When I fell,
there, you know, I didn't lose consciousness at once. Or I kept regaining it. I
don't know. It was more like being paralyzed.'
    'You
were.'
    'I
was on the ground. I couldn't get up. My face was in the dirt, in that soft
leaf mold. It was in my nostrils and eyes. I couldn't move. Couldn't see. As if
I was in the ground. Sunk into it, part of it. I knew I was between two trees
even though I never saw them. I suppose I could feel the roots. Below me in the
ground, down under the ground. My hands were bloody, I could feel that, and the
blood made the dirt around my face sticky. I felt the fear. It kept growing. As
if they'd finally known I was there, lying on them there,
under them, among them, the thing they feared, and yet part of their fear
itself. I couldn't stop sending the fear back, and it kept growing, and I
couldn't move, I couldn't get away. I would pass out, I think, and then the
fear would bring me to again, and I still couldn't move. Any more than they
can.'
    Tomiko
felt the cold stirring of her hair, the readying of the apparatus of terror.
'They: who are they, Osden?'
    'They,
it - I don't know. The fear.'
    'What
is he talking about?' Harfex demanded when Tomiko reported this conversation.
She would not let Harfex question Osden yet, feeling that she must protect
Osden from the onslaught of the Hainishman's powerful, over-repressed emotions.
Unfortunately this fueled the slow fire of paranoid anxiety that burned in poor
Harfex, and he thought she and Osden were in league, hiding some fact of great
importance or peril from the rest of the