Read The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 for Free Online

as he stood with
his back to her, as if the surge of her suppressed rancor had struck him with
physical force.
     
    The
biologist's hunch proved correct. When they began field analyses they found no
animals even among the microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else. All life-forms
were photo-synthesizing or saprophagous, living off light or death, not off
life. Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the visitors from the
house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown,
red. Infinite silences. Only the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm
soughing wind laden with spores and pollens, blowing the sweet pale-green dust
over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather, flowerless forests
where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad
and serene. The Surveyors, wandering like picnickers over sunny plains of
violet filicaliformes, spoke softly to each other. They knew their voices broke
a silence of a thousand million years, the silence of wind and leaves, leaves
and wind, blowing and ceasing and blowing again. They talked softly; but being
human, they talked.
    'Poor
old Osden,' said Jenny Chong, Bio and Tech, as she piloted a helijet on the
North Polar Quadrating run. 'All that fancy hi-fi stuff in his brain and
nothing to receive. What a bust.'
    'He
told me he hates plants,' Olleroo said with a giggle. 'You'd think he'd like
them, since they don't bother him like we do.'
    'Can't
say I much like these plants myself,' said Porlock, looking down at the purple
undulations of the North Circumpolar Forest. 'All the same. No mind. No change.
A man alone in it would go right off his head,'
    'But
it's all alive,' Jenny Chong said. 'And if it lives, Osden hates it.'
    'He's
not really so bad,' Olleroo said, magnanimous. Porlock looked at her sidelong
and asked, 'You ever slept with him, Olleroo?'
    Olleroo
burst into tears and cried, 'You Terrans are obscene!'
    'No
she hasn't,' Jenny Chong said, prompt to defend. 'Have you, Porlock?'
    The
chemist laughed uneasily: ha, ha, ha. Flecks of spittle appeared on his
mustache.
    'Osden
can't bear to be touched,' Olleroo said shakily. 'I just brushed against him
once by accident and he knocked me off like I was some sort of dirty ... thing.
We're all just things, to him.'
    'He's
evil,' Porlock said in a strained voice, startling the two women. 'He'll end up
shattering this team, sabotaging it, one way or another. Mark my words. He's
not fit to live with other people!'
    They
landed on the North Pole. A midnight sun smouldered over low hills. Short, dry,
greenish-pink bryoform grasses stretched away in every direction, which was all
one direction, south. Subdued by the incredible silence, the three Surveyors
set up their instruments and set to work, three viruses twitching minutely on
the hide of an unmoving giant.
    Nobody
asked Osden along on runs as pilot or photographer or recorder, and he never
volunteered, so he seldom left base camp. He ran Harfex's botanical taxonomic
data through the onship computers, and served as assistant to Eskwana, whose
job here was mainly repair and maintenance. Eskwana had begun to sleep a great
deal, twenty-five hours or more out of the thirty-two-hour day, dropping off in
the middle of repairing a radio or checking the guidance circuits of a helijet.
The Coordinator stayed at base one day to observe. No one else was home except
Poswet To, who was subject to epileptic fits; Mannon had plugged her into a
therapy-circuit today in a state of preventive catatonia. Tomiko spoke reports
into the storage banks, and kept an eye on Osden and Eskwana. Two hours passed.
    'You
might want to use the 860 microwaldoes in sealing that connection,' Eskwana
said in his soft, hesitant voice.
    'Obviously!'
    'Sorry.
I just saw you had the 840's there—'
    'And
will replace them when I take the 860's out. When
    I
don't know how to proceed, Engineer, I'll ask your advice.'
    After
a minute "Tomiko looked