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

round. Sure enough, there was Eskwana sound
asleep, head on the table, thumb in his mouth.
    'Osden.'
    The
white face did not turn, he did not speak, but conveyed impatiently that he was
listening.
    'You
can't be unaware of Eskwana's vulnerability.'
    'I
am not responsible for his psychopathic reactions.'
    'But
you are responsible for your own. Eskwana is essential to our work here, and
you're not. If you can't control your hostility, you must avoid him
altogether.'
    Osden
put down his tools and stood up. 'With pleasure!' he said in his vindictive,
scraping voice. 'You could not possibly imagine what it's like to experience
Eskwana's irrational terrors. To have to share his horrible cowardice, to have
to cringe with him at everything!'
    'Are
you trying to justify your cruelty towards him? I thought you had more
self-respect.' Tomiko found herself shaking with spite. 'If your empathic power
really makes you share Ander's misery, why does it never induce the least compassion
in you?'
    'Compassion,'
Osden said. 'Compassion. What do you know about compassion?'
    She
stared at him, but he would not look at her.
    'Would
you like me to verbalize your present emotional affect regarding myself?' he
said. 'I can do so more precisely than you can. I'm trained to analyze such
responses as I receive them. And I do receive them.'
    'But
how can you expect me to feel kindly towards you when you behave as you do?'
    'What
does it matter how I behave, you stupid
sow, do you think it makes any difference? Do you think the average human is a
well of loving-kindness? My choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being
a woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated.'
    'That's
rot. Self-pity. Every man has—'
    'But
I am not a man,' Osden said, 'There are all of you. And there is myself. I am one.'
    Awed
by that glimpse of abysmal solipsism, she kept silent a while;
finally she said with neither spite nor pity, clinically, 'You could kill
yourself, Osden.'
    'That's
your way, Haito,' he jeered. 'I'm not depressive, and seppuku isn't my
bit. What do you want me to do here?'
    'Leave.
Spare yourself and us. Take the aircar and a data-feeder and go do a species
count. In the forest; Harfex hasn't even started the forests yet. Take a
hundred-square-meter forested area, anywhere inside radio range. But outside
empathy range. Report in at 8 and 24 o'clock daily.'
    Osden
went, and nothing was heard from him for five days but laconic all-well signals
twice daily. The mood at base camp changed like a stage-set. Eskwana stayed
awake up to eighteen hours a day. Poswet To got out her stellar lute and
chanted the celestial harmonies (music had driven Osden into a frenzy).
Mannon, Harfex, Jenny Chong, and Tomiko all went off tranquillizers. Porlock
distilled something in his laboratory and drank it all by himself. He had a
hangover. Asnanifoil and Poswet To held an all-night Numerical Epiphany, that
mystical orgy of higher mathematics which is the chief pleasure of the
religious Cetian soul. Olleroo slept with everybody. Work went well.
    The
Hard Scientist came towards base at a run,
laboring through the high, fleshy stalks of the graminiformes. 'Something - in
the forest—' His eyes bulged, he panted, his mustache and fingers trembled.
'Something big. Moving, behind me. I was putting in a benchmark, bending down.
It came at me. As if it was swinging down out of the trees. Behind me.' He
stared at the others with the opaque eyes of terror or exhaustion.
    'Sit
down, Porlock. Take it easy. Now wait, go through this again. You saw something—'
    'Not
clearly. Just the movement. Purposive. A - an -I don't
know what it could have been. Something self-moving. In the trees, the
arboriformes, whatever you call 'em. At the edge of the woods.'
    Harfex
looked grim. 'There is nothing here that could attack you, Porlock. There are
not even microzoa. There could not be a large
animal.'
    'Could
you possibly have seen an epiphyte drop suddenly, a vine
come loose behind