HARM by Brian W. Aldiss

questions? I thought we were getting along well, establishing rapport, as it were. Now you dare take advantage of my—”
    “Oh, I don’t have to—”
    “What’s this? You are contradicting me now? Just when I was trying to help you? You ungrateful swine!” He banged his fist on the desk. “Records show you to be a ruffian of the first order! Guard!”
    The guard appeared with astonishing promptitude.
    “Charlie, take this blackguard and lock him up in one of the basement cells.”
    Paul cried, “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
    “You Muslims are all the fucking same!” Dick shouted. “Ungrateful pigs!”
    “Come on, sonny boy!” said the guard, propelling the prisoner forward by the neck.
             
    T HE BASEMENT CELL was small and dark. Its walls were slimy. Its floor was slimy. A stink of vomit prevailed. Something came crawling over the prisoner’s body and he shrieked. It scampered off. He supposed it was a rat. And there were other rats. He heard them running here and there. They ran across his legs.
    It seemed the rats had fleas. Or the last miserable wretch to be shut in here had left some of his fleas behind. There were other things, too. Crawling or flying. Gnats hummed by his ear.
    Suddenly an overhead light came on, blindingly bright. Someone down the end of the corridor had switched on the light—not out of kindness, but so that he could see the filth that surrounded him. The vomit lay in a corner, mainly green and streaked with blood. The rats were at it. They flinched for a moment at the light and then went on with their feast.
    As Prisoner B scrunched himself up against the opposite wall, a large cockroach ran from under his heel. It scuttled away, took a swift turn, and disappeared under the cell door. A mosquito, flying blind, came too near. He scrunched it against his forehead.
    His whole body itched. He was in the kingdom of the insects.
    And the cell was chillingly cold.
             
    S LEEPING IN THE TREES was chillingly cold.
    Initially, he chose a tree which had a creeper climbing over it, covered in little fruits like pearls. The creeper grew from the ground, twisting around the trunk of the tree and ascending into its very tops. It was the season for the small fruits. Fremant tasted one, but the flavor was repugnant. With dawn, the fruits shone like teardrops.
    He regarded the creeper as a parasite and took some trouble to haul its many stalks out of the branches of the tree. Finally the strands were all cleared away and lay in a pile nearby. The tree immediately began to die. By the next Dimoff, it had fallen, rotten, to the ground.
    One day he awoke at sunrise, shivering. Looking down from the rough platform he had constructed in a tree, he saw the ground overnight had become covered with wild irises which were just bursting into pristine bloom, coloring the landscape with their purple-blue flowers. Each opening bud contained a blue-tinted grub.
    Although he wondered if the irises exuded poison if you touched them, he climbed down and crouched among them, still shaking with cold. He listened, all senses alert. He caught surrounding vibrations. Something like a noise, almost music, came to him. It could be unseen insects. The plants he had taken for irises themselves gave out a low vibration; their petals were crisp and rubbed gently against each other—Fremant assumed to attract pollinators and to shake out the nesting grubs.
    Or fractions of those elusive vibrations possibly emanated from his own body. That extra 3 percent of oxygen on Stygia, as compared to Earth, could be affecting his own metabolism. He was burning out more quickly than normal—burning to death. A kind of religious angst overcame him.
    He stood up, to find himself ankle-deep in the stridulating purple flowers.
    He was filled with wonder for this strange planet—wonder and dread. He was alien to it, and it to him.
    Similar worries bedeviled his quest for food: Was this or that berry