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

face. Contention frightened
him. Olleroo looked up with a vacant yet eager expression, the eternal
spectator.
    'Why
shouldn't I be?' said Osden. He was not looking at
    Asnanifoil,
and was keeping physically as far away from all of them as he could in the
crowded cabin. 'None of you constitute, in yourselves, any reason for my
changing my behavior.'
    Harfex,
a reserved and patient man, said, 'The reason is that we shall be spending
several years together. Life will be better for all of us if—'
    'Can't
you understand that I don't give a damn for all of you?' Osden said, took up
his microtapes, and went out. Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil
was drawing slipstreams in the air with his finger and muttering the Ritual
Primes. 'You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on the
part of the Terran Authority. I saw this almost at once. This mission is meant
to fail,' Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder.
Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. 'I did
tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.'
    All
the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their
fellow team members intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally
sympathetic. They had to work together in close quarters and nasty places, and
could expect one another's paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias and
compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least
most of the time. Osden might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and
his personality was disastrous. He had been sent only on account of his
singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range bioempathic
receptivity. His talent wasn't species-specific; he could pick up emotion or
sentience from anything that felt. He could share lust with a white rat, pain
with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy with a moth. On an alien world, the
Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything nearby is
sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden's tide was a new
one: he was the team's Sensor.
    'What
is emotion, Osden?' Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to
make some rapport with him for once. 'What is it, exactly, that you pick up
with your empathic sensitivity?'
    'Muck,'
the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. 'The psychic excreta of the
animal kingdom. I wade through your faeces.'
    'I
was trying,' she said, 'to learn some facts.' She thought her tone was
admirably calm.
    'You
weren't after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some
curiosity, and a great deal of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog, to
see the maggots crawl. Will you understand once and for all that I don't want
to be got at, that I want to be left alone?' His skin was mottled with red and
violet, his voice had risen. 'Go roll in your own dung, you yellow bitch!' he
shouted at her silence.
    'Calm
down,' she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin.
Of course he had been right about her motives; her question had been largely a
pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But what harm in that? Did not that
effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question she
had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him,
the poor arrogant venomous bastard, Mr No-skin as Olleroo called him. What did
he expect, the way he acted? Love?
    'I
guess he can't stand anybody feeling sorry for him,' said Olleroo, lying on the
lower bunk, gilding her nipples.
    'Then
he can't form any human relationship. All his Dr Hammergeld did was turn an
autism inside out....'
    'Poor
frot,' said Olleroo. 'Tomiko, you don't mind if Harfex comes in for a while
tonight, do you?'
    'Can't
you go to his cabin? I'm sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned
peeled turnip.'
    'You
do hate him, don't you? I guess he feels that. But I slept with Harfex