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

last
night too, and Asnanifoil might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It
would be nicer here.'
    'Service
them both,' Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran
subculture, the East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up
chaste.
    'I
only like one a night,' Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the
Garden Planet, had never discovered chastity, or the wheel.
    'Try
Osden, then,' Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now:
a profound self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism. She had
volunteered for this job because there was, in all probability, no use in doing
it.
    The
little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. 'Tomiko, that was a
dirty thing to say.'
    'Why?'
    'It
would be vile! I'm not attracted to Osden!'
    'I
didn't know it mattered to you,' Tomiko said indifferently, though she did
know. She got some papers together and left the cabin, remarking, 'I hope you
and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell; I'm tired.'
    Olleroo
was crying, tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily.
Tomiko had not wept since she was ten years old.
    It
was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his
computers raised World 4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at
the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched the jade disc grow, a sense of
mutuality grew among them. Osden's selfishness, his accurate cruelty, served
now to draw the others together. 'Perhaps,' Mannon said, 'he was sent as a
beating-gron. What Terrans call a scapegoat Perhaps his influence will be good
after all.' And no one, so careful were they to be kind to one another,
disagreed.
    They
came into orbit. There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of
the lines and clots made by animals who build.
    'No
men,' Harfex murmured.
    'Of
course not,' snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head
inside a polythene bag. He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic
noise he received from the others. 'We're two lightcenturies past the limit of
the Hainish
    Expansion,
and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You don't think Creation would
have made the same hideous mistake twice?'
    No
one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade
immensity below them, where there was life, but not human life. They were
misfits among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace. Even
Osden did not look quite so expressionless as usual; he was frowning.
    Descent
in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like
grass, thick, green, bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against
extended viewcameras, smeared the lenses with a fine pollen.
    'It
looks like a pure phytosphere,' Harfex said. 'Osden, do you pick up anything
sentient?'
    They
all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup
of tea. He did not answer. He seldom answered spoken questions.
    The
chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams
of mad scientists; their chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary
procedure and peck-order, and would have driven a regular service officer out
of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, Dr Haito
Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative
for the first time. 'Mr Sensor Osden,' she said, 'please answer Mr Harfex.'
    'How
could I "pick up" anything from outside,' Osden said without turning,
'with the emotions of nine neurotic hominids pullulating around me like worms
in a can? When I have anything to tell you, I'll tell you. I'm aware of my
responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however,
Coordinator Haito, I'll consider my responsibility void.'
    'Very
well, Mr Sensor. I trust no orders will be needed henceforth.' Tomiko's
bullfrog voice was calm, but Osden seemed to flinch slightly