The word for the world is forest

The Word for World Is Forest

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	Ursula K. Le Guin
Cover artist	Richard M. Powers
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Hainish Cycle
Genre	Science fiction
Published	1976 (Berkley Books)
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	189
ISBN	0-399-11716-4
OCLC	2133448
Dewey Decimal	813/.5/4
LC Class	PZ4.L518 Wo PS3562.E42
Preceded by	The Left Hand of Darkness
Followed by	The Dispossessed

The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novella by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the United States in 1972 as a part of the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and published as a separate book in 1976 by Berkley Books. It is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.

The story focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by people from Earth (referred to as «Terra»). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, whose wife was raped and killed by a Terran military captain, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process their own peaceful culture is introduced to mass violence for the first time.

The novel carries strongly anti-colonial and anti-militaristic overtones, driven partly by Le Guin’s negative reaction to the Vietnam War. It also explores themes of sensitivity to the environment, and of connections between language and culture. It shares the theme of dreaming with Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, and the metaphor of the forest as a consciousness with the story «Vaster than Empires and More Slow».

The novella won the Hugo Award in 1973, and was nominated for several other awards. It received generally positive reviews from reviewers and scholars, and was variously described as moving and hard-hitting. Several critics, however, stated that it compared unfavorably with Le Guin’s other works such as The Left Hand of Darkness, due to its sometimes polemic tone and lack of complex characters.

Background[edit]

Le Guin’s father Alfred Louis Kroeber was an anthropologist, and the exposure that this gave Le Guin influenced all of her works.^[1] Many of the protagonists of Le Guin’s novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon’s World are also anthropologists or social investigators of some kind.^[2] Le Guin uses the term Ekumen for her fictional alliance of worlds, a term which she got from her father, who derived it from the Greek Oikoumene to refer to Eurasian cultures that shared a common origin.^[3]

Le Guin’s interest in Taoism influenced much of her science fiction work. Douglas Barbour stated that the fiction of the Hainish Universe contains a theme of balance between light and darkness, a central theme of Taoism.^[4] She was also influenced by her early interest in mythology, and her exposure to cultural diversity as a child. Her protagonists are frequently interested in the cultures they are investigating, and are motivated to preserve them rather than conquer them.^[5] Authors that influenced Le Guin include Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Lao Tzu.^[6]

Le Guin identifies herself with feminism, and is interested in non-violence and ecological awareness. She has participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. These sympathies can be seen in several of her works of fiction, including the Hainish universe works.^[6] The novels of the Hainish universe frequently explore the effects of differing social and political systems, although she displays a preference for a «society that governs by consensus, a communal cooperation without external government.»^[7] Her fiction also frequently challenges accepted depictions of race and gender.^[7]

The novel was originally named «Little Green Men,»^[8] in reference to the common science-fiction trope. In her introduction to the 1976 edition, Le Guin stated that she was concerned at the exploitation of the natural world by humans, particularly in the name of financial gain, and that this concern drove her story.^[9]

Setting[edit]

The Word for World is Forest is set in the fictional Hainish universe, which Le Guin introduced in her first novel Rocannon’s World, published in 1966. In this alternative history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but on Hain. The people of Hain colonized many neighboring planetary systems, including Terra (Earth) and Athshe, possibly a million years before the setting of the novels.^[10] The planets subsequently lost contact with each other, for reasons that Le Guin does not explain.^[11] Le Guin does not narrate the entire history of the Hainish universe at once, instead letting readers piece it together from various works.^[12]

The novels and other fictional works set in the Hainish universe recount the efforts to re-establish a galactic civilization. Explorers from Hain as well as other planets use interstellar ships taking years to travel between planetary systems, although the journey is shortened for the travelers due to relativistic time dilation, as well as through instantaneous interstellar communication using the ansible, introduced in The Dispossessed.^[11] At least two «thought experiments» are used in each novel; the background idea of a common origin for all the humanoid species, and a second idea unique to each novel.^[10] In The Word for World is Forest, the second thought experiment is the colonization of a pacifist culture on the planet Athshe by a military-controlled logging team from Earth, known in the novel as «Terra»; additionally, the inhabitants of Athshe recognize the people from Terra as human, but the Terrans do not see the Athsheans, who are small and covered in green fur, as human.^[13] The Athsheans refer to the Terrans as «yumens», while the Terrans tend to use the derogatory term «creechie».^[14]

Most of the surface of the planet of Athshe, known to the human colonizers as «New Tahiti», is taken up by ocean; the land surfaces are concentrated in a single half of the northern hemisphere, and prior to the arrival of Terran colonists, is entirely covered in forest.^[15][14] The Terrans are interested in using this forest as a source of timber, because wood has become a highly scarce commodity on Earth.^[14] Athshe’s plants and animals are similar to those of Earth, placed there by the Hainish people in their first wave of colonisation that also settled Earth. The Cetian visitor also states categorically that the native humans «came from the same, original, Hainish stock».^[16]

The Athsheans are physically small, only about a meter tall, and covered in fine greenish fur.^[17] They are a very non-aggressive people; at one point, one of the Terrans observes that «rape, violent assault, and murder virtually don’t exist among them». They have adopted a number of behaviors to avoid violence, including aggression-halting postures and competitive singing.^[17] Unlike Terrans the Athsheans follow a polycyclic sleep pattern, and their circadian rhythms make them most active at dawn and dusk; thus, they struggle to adapt to the 8-hour Terran working day.^[17] Athsheans are able to enter the dream state consciously, and their dreams both heal them and guide their behavior.^[18] Those individuals adept at interpreting dreams are seen as gods amongst the Athsheans.^[17]

In the internal chronology of the Hainish universe, the events of The Word for World is Forest occur after The Dispossessed, in which both the ansible and the League of Worlds are unrealised dreams. However, the novel is located prior to Rocannon’s World, in which Terran mindspeech is seen as a distinct possibility. A date of 2368 CE has been suggested by reviewers, although Le Guin provides no direct statement of the date.^[19][20]

Plot summary[edit]

The Word for World is Forest begins from the point of view of Captain Davidson, who is the commander of a logging camp named Smith camp. Many native Athsheans are used as slave labor at the camp, and also as personal servants. The novel begins with Davidson travelling to «Centralville», the headquarters of the colony, hoping to have a sexual encounter with one of a number of women who have just arrived on the predominantly male colony. When Davidson returns to Smith Camp, he finds the entire camp burned to the ground, and all of the humans dead. He lands to investigate, and while on the ground is overpowered by four Athsheans. He recognizes one of them as Selver, an Athshean who was a personal servant at the headquarters of the colony, and later an assistant to Raj Lyubov, the colony anthropologist.^[21] A few months prior to the attack, Davidson had raped Selver’s wife Thele, who died in the process, prompting an enraged Selver to attack Davidson. Davidson nearly kills him, before he is rescued by Lyubov; however, he is left with prominent facial scars, which render him easily recognizable.^[21] The Athsheans allow Davidson to leave and carry a message about the destruction of the camp back to the colony headquarters.^[21]

After the attack, Selver roams through the forest for five days before coming upon an Athshean settlement.^[22] After recovering from the effects of many days of travel, Selver describes to the people of the town the destruction of his town, known as Eshreth, by the Terrans, who then built their headquarters at the site. He also tells them about the enslavement of hundreds of Athsheans at the various camps.^[23] He says that the Terrans are crazy because they do not respect the sanctity of life in the same way that the Athsheans do, which was why he led the attack against camp Smith.^[23] After some discussion, the people of the town send messengers to other towns sharing Selver’s story, while Selver himself travels back towards the Terran headquarters.

An inquiry into the destruction of camp Smith is held at Centralville. In addition to the personnel of the colony, two emissaries from the planets of Hain and Tau Ceti also participate. Lyubov states that the colony’s mistreatment and enslavement of the Athsheans led to the attack.^[24] Colonel Dongh, the commander of the colony, blames Lyubov’s assessment of the Athsheans as non-aggressive.^[25] The emissaries state that the rules of Terra’s colonial administration have changed since the colony last heard from it; they present the colony with an ansible, which can communicate instantly with Terra and the colonial administration (communication which would otherwise take 27 years in one direction).^[26] They also state that Terra is now a member of the «League of Worlds», of which they are emissaries.^[26] The colony is forced to release all its Athshean slaves, and minimize contact with them. Davidson is transferred to a different camp under a higher-ranking commander, as punishment for a retaliatory raid that he carried out.^[27] However, Davidson violates his orders and leads further attacks against Athshean towns, without the knowledge of his superiors.^[28]

Following the inquiry, Lyubov visits the Athshean town he had been studying. He meets Selver, hoping to rebuild their friendship, but Selver rebuffs him, telling him to stay away from the town center.^[29] Two nights later, Selver leads the Athsheans in a massive attack on Centralville. Although the attack deliberately avoids Lyubov’s house, Lyubov leaves during the attack and is killed by a collapsing building. The attack kills all of the women in the colony; the men that survive are herded into a compound and held prisoner. Selver tells them that the attack was in retaliation for Davidson’s killings in the south, which the survivors are ignorant of.^[30] Selver states that if the Terrans agree to restrict themselves to a small area and agree to avoid conflict with the Athsheans, they will be left in peace until the next Terran ship arrives to take them off the colony.^[30] The survivors agree to his terms, and order all their remaining outposts to withdraw, including the one at which Davidson lives.^[31]

However, Davidson disobeys orders and continues to attack Athshean towns, refusing to return to Centralville.^[32] After a couple of weeks, the Athsheans attack Davidson’s camp, killing or capturing everybody except Davidson and two others, who escape in a helicopter. Although the others want to return to Centralville, Davidson orders them back to fight the Athsheans. The Helicopter crashes, killing all but Davidson, who is captured.^[33] He is taken before Selver, who says that Davidson gave Selver the gift of murder, but that Selver would not kill Davidson, because there was no need. Instead, the Athsheans abandon Davidson on an island that Terran logging has rendered barren.^[34] Three years later the Terran ships return and take the surviving colonists off the planet; the commander of the ships states that the Terrans will not return except as observers and scientists, as the planet has been placed under a ban by the League of Worlds. Selver gives Lyubov’s research, which he has saved, to one of the emissaries, who tells him that Lyubov’s efforts to protect the Athsheans will not be forgotten, and that his work will be given the value it deserves. Selver reflects that although the planet may have been won from the Terrans, his people have now learned the ability to kill without reason.^[35]

Publication and reception[edit]

The Word for World is Forest was initially published in the first volume of the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972,^[36] which was edited by Harlan Ellison.^[37] The volume was meant to be a collection of new and original stories from authors that had come to be known as the «New Left» of science fiction.^[38] It has subsequently been reprinted as a stand-alone volume several times, beginning in 1976, when it was published by Berkley Books.^[37][39] The work was nominated for the Nebula^[40] and Locus Awards for Best Novella^[41] and won the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella.^[42] It was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 1976.^[43]

The novella has received significant critical attention since it was published, along with Vaster than Empires and More Slow, with which it is frequently compared.^[38] It has gotten generally positive reviews from critics and scholars, although several noted that it was not Le Guin’s best work. Kirkus Reviews stated in 1976 that the book was «Lesser Le Guin, but often impressive»,^[44] while Carol Hovanec called it «brief but stunning.»^[9] Suzanne Reid stated that the novella was «deeply moving and shocking by turns».^[14] The novel contrasts good and evil very explicitly, unlike in other Hainish cycle works such as The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, which made The Word for World is Forest less complex than those other works.^[14]

Charlotte Spivack stated that although the novel was «deftly written and imaginatively conceived», its «polemic» style made it a lesser literary achievement than many of Le Guin’s other works.^[45] She says that unlike many other characters that Le Guin has created, such as George Orr and Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven, several characters in The Word for World is Forest, such as Davidson, exist only as one-dimensional stereotypes. She described the style of the novel as «moving and hard-hitting», but said that because it was written in the mood of the reaction to the Vietnam War, it was «not meant to be entertainment».^[45]

Primary characters[edit]

Don Davidson[edit]

Captain Don Davidson begins the novel as the commander of Smith Camp. He is described as being of «euraf» descent.^[46] Shortly before the events of the novel, Davidson rapes Thele, Selver’s wife, who dies in the process.^[47] After Smith is destroyed by Selver and his compatriots, Davidson is relocated to a camp called New Java, where he leads reprisals against the Athsheans against orders. He is eventually captured and abandoned on an isolated island by the Athsheans. He is portrayed as a relentless and uncompromising figure, always planning how to overcome an unfriendly natural environment and conquer the natives, whom he sees as inferior.^[48] The language used in Davidson’s internal monologues reveals his hatred and contempt for people different from himself.^[49] Initially, this hatred is directed at the Athsheans, whom he sees as nonhuman and refers to as «creechies» (a derivative of «creatures»). However, his contempt extends to the women in the colony and eventually to other members of the military, who follow the Colonel’s orders not to fight the Athsheans.^[48] He has racist feelings towards the South Asian anthropologist Raj Lyubov, stating that «some men, especially, the asiatiforms and the hindi types, are actually born traitors.»^[48] In contrast to Lyubov and Selver, he is depicted as a person who is not self-aware, whose self-hatred and rigid mental attitude are his undoing. He rejects out of hand anything that does not conform to his beliefs, dismissing anyone who disagrees with him as «going spla» (insane).^[48]

Selver[edit]

Selver is the chief Athshean protagonist of the novel.^[50] He is training to become a dreamer among the Athsheans when the Terrans colonize Athshe, and Selver is enslaved.^[51] Selver, referred to as «Sam» by the Terrans, is initially used as a manservant in the colony headquarters, before Lyubov comes across him and takes him on as an interpreter and assistant. They quickly form a bond, and Selver helps Lyubov understand both the Athshean language and their method of dreaming.^[51] Although Lyubov is willing to allow Selver to escape, Selver tells him that he will not because his wife Thele is also a slave at the camp.^[51] After learning this, Lyubov allows the two to meet secretly in his quarters; however, Thele is raped by Davidson, and dies in the process. An enraged Selver attacks Davidson, who nearly kills him before Lyubov rescues Selver and sets him free against orders.^[51] In contrast to Davidson, Selver is depicted as a highly sensitive and intuitive individual.^[50] After he tells his story to the other Athsheans, they begin to see him as a «sha’ab» or god, who interprets his own experiences and dreams to mean that the Terrans must be killed and forced off the planet.^[45]

Raj Lyubov[edit]

Raj Lyubov is the anthropologist in the colony, a scholar who holds the honorary rank of «captain».^[52] He is depicted as being from an Indian heritage.^[8] Selver is initially a servant in the central camp; Lyubov enlists him as an assistant, and builds a relationship of trust with him. The two of them compile a dictionary of the Athshean and Terran languages. When Selver’s wife Thele is raped and killed by Davidson, Selver attacks Davidson, who nearly kills him; Lyubov rescues Selver, and nurses him back to health. During the attack on the colony’s headquarters, Selver tells the Athsheans to leave Lyubov’s house alone, but Lyubov leaves his house and is killed by a collapsing building. As he dies, Lyubov warns Selver about the impact of the killings on the Athshean society.^[53] In comparison to Davidson, Lyubov reflects a lot upon his actions, and tries to analyze them in a detached manner. His contradictory position of being a colonial officer despite recognizing the damage that the colony is doing to the Athsheans gives him migraines.^[54] He feels a strong sense of guilt at the impacts of the colony, and is willing to destroy his own reputation in order to protect the Athshean people.^[55] He is one of the only Terrans to treat the Athsheans as human beings, although this loses him the respect of his fellow Terrans.^[54]

Themes[edit]

Hainish universe themes[edit]

Similar to future history works by other authors such as Isaac Asimov, Le Guin’s fictional works set in the Hainish universe explore the idea of human society expanding across the galaxy.^[11] Books like The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Word for World is Forest also explore the effects of various social and political systems.^[7] Le Guin’s later Hainish novels also challenge contemporary ideas about gender, ethnic differences, the value of ownership, and human beings’ relationship to the natural world.^[56]

In comparison to the other worlds of the Hainish universe, the relationship between Athshe and the League of Worlds is portrayed as ambiguous. Whereas with planets such as Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness the integration with the Hainish planets is seen as a good thing, Athshe is seen as changed for the worse both by the loggers and by being taught to kill their own species.^[57] The League eventually decides to isolate Athshe and limit all contact with it, a decision shown to have ambiguous overtones.^[57]

Language and communication[edit]

Language and linguistic barriers are a major theme in The Word for World Is Forest, something exemplified by the title. In contrast to other Hainish universe novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World Is Forest portrays a communication gap that the protagonists are never able to bridge.^[13] Both the native Athsheans and the loggers have languages that reflect their perceptions of reality, but they are unable to find a common language. In the native Athshean language, the word «Athshe» means both «forest» and «world», demonstrating the close link that the Athsheans have to the forest and their planet.^[13] It is noted by Lyubov that the Athsheans believe «the substance of their world was not earth, but forest».^[58] The language used by the Athsheans during conversations similarly show their interconnectedness and dependence on their ecosystem through the use of forest related metaphors.^[59]

Similarly, the Athshean word for «dream» is the same as the word for «root». Athsheans have learned to exert some conscious control over their dreams, and their actions are dictated by both their dream experiences and their conscious non-dreaming thoughts. Thus their dreaming makes them rooted, something which is demonstrated through their use of language.^[13] The Athshean word for «god» is the same as the word for «translator», representing this role that «gods have» in their society, which is to interpret and translate their dreams into actions.^[45]

Dreaming and consciousness[edit]

The Word for World is Forest shares the theme of dreaming with the later Le Guin novel The Lathe of Heaven.^[50] Suzanne Reid stated that the novel examines the source and effect of dreams.^[14] The Athsheans teach themselves to consciously and actively control their dreams.^[60] This allows them to access their subconscious in a way that the Terrans are not able.^[60] The Athsheans follow a polycyclic sleep pattern with a period of 120 minutes, which makes it impossible for them to adapt to the Terran eight-hour work day. Their dreaming is not restricted to times when they are asleep, with adept dreamers being able to dream while wide awake as well.^[50] The visions they see while dreaming direct and shape their waking behavior, which Selver describes as «balanc[ing] your sanity … on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.»^[50]

The leaders among the Athsheans are the best dreamers, and they consider individuals able to interpret dreams to be gods.^[45] The Athshean word for «god» is the same as the word for «translator», representing this role that «gods have» in their society.^[45] Spivack writes that Selver becomes such a god during the events of The Word for World is Forest, but his interpretation of dreams is a negative one, because it tells the Athsheans how to kill.^[45]

The Athsheans perceive the Terrans as an insane people, partly because of the disconnect amongst the Terrans between conscious, rational thinking and subconscious drives.^[60] The Terrans frequent use of hallucinogens is seen as the closest they are able to get to understanding their own subconscious. The psychological equilibrium which their dreaming gives the Athsheans is portrayed as the reason why they are able to live in balance with their ecosystem.^[60]

Reviewer Ian Watson states that the Athshean forest itself is a metaphor for consciousness in the novel. The Terrans, distanced from their own tangled subconscious, are afraid of the forest, and seek to tear it down.^[60] The Athsheans, in contrast, are integrated with it at a subconscious level. The entire forest is also seen as a collective Athshean consciousness.^[60] Although the forest in The Word for World is Forest is not actually sentient, Le Guin explores the idea of a sentient forest further in the short story «Vaster than Empires and More Slow», which shares many thematic parallels with the former.^[60]

Colonialism and anti-war themes[edit]

Le Guin was strongly opposed to and troubled by the Vietnam War, a reaction which played a large part in the tone of the novel.^[13] The tone of the novel is often harsh and hard-hitting, playing off the anger in the United States at American military actions in Vietnam.^[45] The tension between violence and non-violence is a part of the dialectic theme in the novel, of a constant tension between opposites.^[45] Through most of the novel, the Terran military is in control of the colony, despite Raj Lyubov’s good intentions. Davidson is the most prominent example of the oppressiveness of the military government.^[60] There are intentional parallels drawn between the Terran colonizers and the US intervention in Vietnam; the anti-interventionist tone of the novel was in sharp contrast to other science-fiction novels about war written around the same period.^[60] For example, the high use of drugs amongst US troops in Vietnam is represented by the use of hallucinogens amongst the Terran soldiers, which Le Guin portrays as the norm on the colony.^[60]

The Athsheans, in contrast, are shown as an innately peaceful and non-aggressive people, at least at the beginning of novel. Rape and murder are virtually unknown on the planet.^[17] They have adopted a number of behaviors that preempt violence; thus when Selver has Davidson pinned down after the attack on Smith camp, he finds himself unable to kill Davidson, despite the hate he feels towards the Terran.^[17] Selver spends much of the novel reflecting on the effect that violence has on his own culture. He turns to violence, against the Athshean ethic, in order to save his culture as he sees it.^[61] However, unlike Davidson, who enjoys killing, Selver sees it as something poisoning his culture. This perception is shared by his fellow Athsheans: one of the elders of the Athsheans says to Selver «You’ve done what you had to do, and it was not right.»^[61]

The Word for World is Forest also challenges the idea of colonialism; the Terran colonists are depicted as being blind to the culture of the Athsheans, and convinced that they represent a higher form of civilization.^[14] Le Guin also challenges the metaphorical preference in Western cultures for pure light, in contrast to deeper and more complex shadows.^[14]

Ecological sensitivity[edit]

Throughout the novel Le Guin draws a contrast between the Athshean way of integrating with the ecology of the planet, and the Terran way of destroying it. The Athsheans are portrayed as having a decentralized society, which has not damaged the ecosystem to further its own economy.^[13] In comparison, the Terrans are shown as having nearly destroyed their planet by exhausting its natural resources, and having come to Athshe to plunder its resources.^[13] The Terrans have an instrumentalist view of the forest, seeing it as wood to be shipped to Terra and land to be transformed into farms.^[50] The Athshean dwellings and towns are built in a way that allows them to integrate with their environment:

No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex. Little paths ran under the branches, around the boles, over the roots: they did not go straight, but yielded to every obstacle, devious as nerves …^[62][61]

This depiction not only links the Athsheans to their environment, but gives primacy to the forest over the rest of the natural ecosystem.^[61] The Athsheans’ clans are named after trees, and their highly decentralized social structure is constructed in a way that resembles their ecosystem.^[61] To the Athsheans, being a mentally healthy person is equivalent to being in touch with their roots, which are closely linked to their ecosystem.^[61] In contrast, the Terrans’ behavior, such as rape and murder, is attributed to their leaving «their roots behind them».^[61] In the Athshean language the word for «forest» is also the word for «world», showing the dependence of the Athshean culture upon the forest.^[20] In contrast, the Terrans ignorance of the ecology of the planet has already denuded one island in the archipelago, and is damaging the rest of the planet. Davidson sees the forest as a waste of space, and wishes to turn it into farmland.^[20]

The contrast between the Terran relationship to the planet and the Athshean one is the major example of a larger dialectical structure within the novel, a comparison of opposites.^[50] Throughout, the Athsheans are shown as living in balance with their world, while the Terrans despoil it. The Athsheans are shown as a gentle people, in contrast the violence and aggression of the Terrans.^[50]

The three main characters of the novella, Selver, Lyubov, and Davidson, have been described by reviewers as representing three different historical attitudes towards nature. Davidson represents the machismo of some early explorers, who feared nature and wanted to overcome it.^[63] Lyubov has a more positive but highly romanticized view of the forest, while only Selver and the other Athsheans are able to live in harmony with it.^[50]

Resemblance to Avatar[edit]

Several reviewers have noted that the narrative of the 2009 film Avatar has many similarities to that of The Word for World is Forest.^[64][65] Specific similarities include the notion that the Earth’s resources have been used up, the extraction of resources in an exploitative manner from another planet, a native population on that planet which lives in close harmony with their world, and a rebellion by those natives against the exploitative human colonizers.^[64] A key difference lies in the roles of the «benevolent» humans in both works: Raj Lyubov in The Word for World is Forest, Jake Sully and the human scientists in Avatar. While Lyubov made an impression as a «sensible» human and did help mediate peace between the Athshean people and humanity, he is not the savior of their race, and he does not survive to claim any «prize» from it. Additionally, in The Word for World is Forest militarism is regarded by the Athsheans – especially Selver – as an unfortunate but necessary addition to Athshean culture, and one that may destroy their way of life. In contrast, militarism is seen less critically in Avatar.^[64] In the introduction to the second volume of the Hainish Novels and Stories,^[66] Le Guin signals the similarities with «a high-budget, highly successful film» which «completely reverses the book’s moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution» and states «I’m glad I have nothing at all to do with it».^[66]

Style and structure[edit]

The novel has eight chapters, narrated by each of the three main characters in turn. Davidson narrates chapters 1, 4, and 7; Selver narrates chapters 2, 6, and 8; and Lyubov narrates chapters 3 and 5.^[49] This alternation emphasizes both the differences between the characters and their isolation within their societies. Lyubov and Davidson’s chapters are narrated from a limited omniscient point of view, making their chapters seem like internal monologues.^[49] Davidson’s belief in the inferiority of the Athsheans and his adversarial attitude towards the planet are directly presented to the reader, along with Lyubov’s struggle to do his job dispassionately while following his personal morality.^[49] In contrast, Selver’s chapters are written from a truly omniscient point of view, allowing Le Guin to give the reader information about the planet and its people. Selver has no extensive monologues; instead, several other Athsheans also feature prominently in his chapters.^[49]

Although the novel is an anti-war novel portraying a military conflict, unusually, it does not describe most of the action, planning, and strategy. Instead, most of the action happens off the page, and the novel focuses on the decisions being made about the conflict in the minds of the principal characters.^[49] The language used within each chapter shifts with the protagonist, revealing the way they think about the events of the book. Davidson’s monologues are filled with the derogatory language he uses; the Athsheans are referred to by the slang term «creechie», the women in the colony are «prime human stock,» and so forth.^[49]

Le Guin herself later said she was unhappy with the «strident» tone of the novel. She had been troubled by the Vietnam War, but was living in London when she wrote the novel, cut off from the anti-war movement she had been a part of in Oregon. Written in these circumstances, The Word for World is Forest became what Le Guin called a «preachment».^[49] She stated that writing the book was like «taking dictation from a boss with ulcers».^[60] She said that she had wanted to write about forests and dreaming, but that the «boss» had made her write instead about ecological destruction.^[60] Charlotte Spivack stated that the book was an «angry work», that ended on a note of futility and despair.^[20]

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Ursula K. Le Guin (Modern Critical Views) (1st ed.). New York, NY: Chelsea House. ISBN 0-87754-659-2.
• Cadden, Mike (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-99527-2.
• Latham, R. (2007). Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction. The Yearbook of English Studies, 37(2), 103–119.
• Le Guin, Ursula K. (May 1992). The Language of the Night (revised ed.). HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-016835-3.

External links[edit]

• The Word for World Is Forest title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Introduction

Written in the glare of the United States’ war on Indochina, and first published as a
separate book in that war’s dire aftermath, The Word for World is Forest is a
reflection on invasion, exploitation and oppression, and on the necessity and cost of
resistance.

Though short, the novel is far from slight. It brings into sharp focus several of its
author’s enduring concerns, and draws on the same intellectual resources that
illuminate her wider work: notably anthropology, anarchism, feminism and Taoism.

Characteristically of all Le Guin’s writing, it embodies the stubborn virtue of seeing
with both eyes, in depth and in colour, without looking away from or ignoring
uncomfortable truths.

At the time of the novel’s setting, some centuries in the future, Vietnam is history
— a history well remembered by one of the characters, Colonel Dongh. The prevailing
social system on Earth and its colonies is still some sort of state capitalism, by now
the driver of an interstellar imperialism. Racism has mutated and evolved to the point
where having recent African ancestry — rather than having no trace of it — is to the
racist eye what makes one fully human. That venomous notion has been given its
own cosmic inflation by the discovery that there are in reality more races than even
the Victorians suspected: Homo sapiens has a common ancestry’ with a forerunner
species, the still extant and annoyingly wise Hainish, who in the distant past settled
many worlds, including Earth.

Also of Hainish (and of terrestrial) descent are the natives of Athshe, the world
for which the word is forest. Gentle, tribal, matriarchal, and small, they are easy prey.

Just strong enough to be slaves, too weak to be a threat, their likely fate is extinction.
The forests in which they live are being felled around them to clear ground for future
settlement and to satisfy an insatiable yearning for wood, a luxury almost beyond
price back on the deforested home planet.

If we read the tale at too literal a level, as some critics have done, this makes no
economic sense. It is almost inconceivable that interstellar extractive exploitation
across all those decades of light- years could be profitable. Such nit-picking can
sensibly and safely be ignored. In the first place, we have no textual evidence that it’s
even meant to make economic sense. Perhaps it’s a mere whim of businessmen-
bureaucrats who have no need to profit on their very long-term investment.

Furthermore, in a world where the kauri trees of New Zealand were felled and sawn
up to make (among other such vital necessities) decking for yachts, and where the
elephant is being driven close to extinction for ivory trinkets, and the rhinoceros for
the entirely bogus medical virtues of powder made from its horn, and so on (and on)
and where Vietnam is still suffering grievously from the effects of the chemical
defoliants dumped on it at the very time this book was being written… in such a
world, one would think, a writer crafting a protest is surely permitted some small
poetic license.

In the other great SF work to come out of what in Vietnam is known as the
American War, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, the conflict is between equally
powerful empires and is in the end revealed to be the result of mutual
misunderstanding. No such reassurance rounds off The Word for World is Forest. The
author’s sympathy is entirely with the enemy. The invaders from Earth are
indisputably the bad guys and the rebellious natives are entirely in the right. But the
novel’s revolutionary defeatism doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising the revolt
of the oppressed. The Athsheans are changed by the very act of fighting, new and
strange to them; the world they win back is not the same as the world that was taken
from them; and their fight is not fair, or discriminating, or by the rules. It is dirty and
brutal and shocking.

That oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known. That resistance to
oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely
recognised — particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and
solidarity. The ennobling aspect of resistance — of standing up, of fighting back, of
driving the invader from the homeland — is seen and celebrated. The corrupting aspect
— the hardening of the heart, the acceptance of casualty and atrocity’, the replacement
of the moral calculus with a cold-eyed calculation of advantage, of revenge and
reprisal — is put out of mind, and sometimes for what seem the best of reasons. That
too is part of the damage done.

Le Guin’s subtle Taoist dialectic of darkness and light does not stop there. The
Athsheans’ world, we see and are told early on, is itself a failed and lost Hainish
colony. Not only the hominids, but most or all of the planet’s species of plants and
animals are descended from a biota transplanted from Earth a million years ago. In
showing us as an alien jungle and as a benign environment what is after all a forest
such as might have covered Europe and North America in the Pleistocene, the novel
gives its readers from those continents some further cause for reflection. And in
implying that the now wise and compassionate Hainish were themselves invaders and
colonisers in the distant past, this tale of damage and destruction carries a small,
secret seed of hope for a better future than it depicts.

Ursula Le Guin may be the SF writer most respected by the literary mainstream,
the most studied academically, her work set texts in countless courses. She remains
subversive, and her work dangerous reading, because it changes the reader and makes
them look at the real world in a different light. This novel’s continuing relevance is a
rebuke to our complacency’.

— Ken MacLeod

Author’s introduction

1. On What the Road to Hell Is Paved With

There is nothing in all Freud’s writings that I like better than his assertion that
artists’ work is motivated by the desire “to achieve honour, power, riches, fame, and
the love of women.” It is such a comforting, such a complete statement; it explains
everything about the artist. There have even been artists who agreed with it; Ernest
Hemingway, for instance; at least, he said he wrote for money, and since he was an
honored, powerful, rich, famous artist beloved by women, he ought to know.

There is another statement about the artist’s desires that is, to me, less obscure;
the first two stanzas of it read,

Riches I hold in light esteem
And Love I laugh to scorn
And lust of Fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn—

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is—“Leave the heart that now I bear
And give me liberty.”

Emily Bronte wrote those lines when she was twenty-two. She was a young and
inexperienced woman, not honored, not rich, not powerful, not famous, and you see
that she was positively rude about love
(“of women” or otherwise). I believe,
however, that she was rather better qualified than Freud to talk about what motivates
the artist. He had a theory. But she had authority.

It may well be useless, if not pernicious, to seek a single motive for a pursuit so
complex, long-pursued, and various as art; I imagine that Bronte got as close to it as
anyone needs to get, with her word “liberty.”

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you
accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts,
labeling them as
“escapism.” The captured soldier tunneling out of prison, the
runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile are escapists. Aren’t they? The definition
also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with
words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston
Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato’s
Republic. It really is a much more useful statement than Freud’s, though nowhere
near as funny.

I am not sure what Freud meant by “power,” in this context. Perhaps significantly,
Bronte does not mention power. Shelley does, indirectly:

“Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.» This is perhaps not too far from what
Freud had in mind, for I doubt he was thinking of the artist’s immediate and joyous
power over his material—the shaping hand, the dancer’s leap, the novelist’s power of
life and death over his characters; it is more probable that he meant the power of the
idea to influence other people.

The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people
off the path of the pursuit of liberty. The reason Bronte does not mention it is
probably that it was never even a temptation to her, as it was to her sister Charlotte.

Emily did not give a damn about other people’s morals. But many artists, particularly
artists of the word, whose ideas must actually he spoken in their work, succumb to
the temptation. They begin to see that they can do good to other people. They forget
about liberty, then, and instead of legislating in divine arrogance, like God or Shelley,
they begin to preach.

In this tale, The Word for World Is Forest, which began as a pure pursuit of
freedom and the dream, I succumbed, in part, to the lure of the pulpit. It is a very
strong lure to a science fiction writer, who deals more directly than most novelists
with ideas, whose metaphors are shaped by or embody ideas, and who therefore is
always in danger of inextricably confusing ideas with opinions.

I wrote The Little Green Men (its first editor, Harlan Ellison, retitled it, with my
rather morose permission) in the winter of 1968, during a year’s stay in London. All
through the sixties, in my home city in the States, I had been helping organize and
participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then
against the pursuance of the war in Viet Nam. I don’t know how many times I walked
down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish, and obstinate, along with ten or
twenty or a hundred other foolish and obstinate souls. There was always somebody
taking pictures of us—not the press—odd-looking people with cheap cameras: John
Birchers? FBI? CIA? Crackpots? No telling. I used to grin at them, or stick out my
tongue. One of my fiercer friends brought a camera once and took pictures of the
picture-takers. Anyhow, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a
channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate
from my writing.

In England that year, a guest and a foreigner, I had no such outlet. And 1968 was
a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The lies and hypocrisies redoubled: so
did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the
defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of noncombatants in the name of
“peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural
resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in
the name of “man.” The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as
inevitable as it was disastrous.

It was from such pressures, internalized, that this story resulted: forced out, in a
sense, against my conscious resistance. I have said elsewhere that I never wrote a
story more easily, fluently, surely— and with less pleasure.

I knew, because of the compulsive quality of the composition, that it was likely to
become a preachment, and I struggled against this. Say not the struggle naught
availeth. Neither Lyubov nor Seiver is mere Virtue Triumphant; moral and
psychological complexity was salvaged, at least, in those characters. But Davidson is,
though not uncomplex, pure; he is purely evil—and I don’t, consciously, believe
purely evil people exist. But my unconscious has other opinions. It looked into itself
and produced, from itself, Captain Davidson. I do not disclaim him.

American involvement in Viet Nam is now past; the immediately intolerable
pressures have shifted to other areas; and so the moralizing aspects of the story are
now plainly visible. These I regret, but I do not disclaim them either. The work must
stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all
specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and
despair, toward justice, or wit. or grace, or liberty.

2. Synchronicity Can Happen at Almost Any Time

A few years ago, a few years after the first publication in America of The Word
for World Is Forest. I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Charles Tart, a
psychologist well known for his researches into and his book on Altered States of
Consciousness. He asked me if I had modeled the Athsheans of the story upon the
Senoi people of Malaysia. The who? said I, so he told me about them. The Senoi are,
or were, a people whose culture includes and is indeed substantially based upon a
deliberate training in and use of the dream. Dr. Tart’s book includes a brief article on
them by Kilton Stewart.[1]

Breakfast in the Senoi house is like a dream clinic, with the father
and older brothers listening to and analysing the dreams of all the
children…

When the Senoi child reports a falling dream, the adult answers
with enthusiasm, “That is a wonderful dream, one of the best dreams a
man can have. Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?”

The Senoi dream is meaningful, active, and creative. Adults deliberately go into
their dreams to solve problems of interpersonal and intercultural conflict. They come
out of their dreams with a new song, tool, dance, idea. The waking and the dreaming
states are equally valid, each acting upon the other in complementary fashion.

The article implies, by omission rather than by direct statement, that the men are
the “great dreamers” among the Senoi; whether this means that the women are
socially inferior, or that their role
(as among the Athsheans) is equal and
compensatory, is not clear. Nor is there any mention of the Senoi conception of
divinity, the numinous, etc.; it is merely stated that they do not practice magic, though
they are perfectly willing to let neighboring peoples think they do, as this discourages
invasion.

They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the
field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such
areas as television and nuclear physics.

It appears that the Senoi have not had a war, or a murder, for several hundred
years.

There they are, twelve thousand of them, farming, hunting, fishing, and dreaming,
in the rain forests of the mountains of Malaysia. Or there they were, in 1935—
perhaps. Kilton Stewart’s report on them has had no professional sequels that I know
of. Were they ever there, and if so, are they still there? In the waking time, I mean, in
what we so fantastically call ‘the real world.’ In the dream time, of course, they are
there, and here. I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens, and I was
only describing the Senoi. It is not only the Captain Davidsons who can be found in
the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there,
too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things we most fear (and therefore deny),
the things we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn’t we start listening to
our dreams, and our children’s dreams?

‘Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?’

Chapter One

TWO pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson’s mind when he woke, and he lay
looking at them in the darkness for a while. One up: the new shipload of women had
arrived. Believe it or not. They were here, in Centralville, twenty-seven lightyears
from Earth by NAFAL and four hours from Smith Camp by hopper, the second batch
of breeding females for the New Tahiti Colony, all sound and clean, 212 head of
prime human stock. Or prime enough, anyhow. One down: the report from Dump
Island of crop failures, massive erosion, a wipe-out. The line of 212 buxom beddable
breasty little figures faded from Davidson’s mind as he saw rain pouring down onto
plowed dirt, churning it to mud, thinning the mud to a red broth that ran down rocks
into the rainbeaten sea. The erosion had begun before he left Dump Island to run
Smith Camp, and being gifted with an exceptional visual memory, the kind they
called eidetic, he could recall it now all too clearly. It looked like that bigdome Kees
was right and you had to leave a lot of trees standing where you planned to put farms.

But he still couldn’t see why a soybean farm needed to waste a lot of space on trees if
the land was managed really scientifically. It wasn’t like that in Ohio; if you wanted
corn you grew corn, and no space wasted on trees and stuff. But then Earth was a
tamed planet and New Tahiti wasn’t. That’s what he was here for: to tame it. If Dump
Island was just rocks and gullies now, then scratch it; start over on a new island and
do better. Can’t keep us down, we’re Men. You’ll learn what that means pretty soon,
you godforsaken damn planet, Davidson thought, and he grinned a little in the
darkness of the hut, for he liked challenges. Thinking Men, he thought Women, and
again the line of little figures began to sway through his mind, smiling, jiggling.

“Ben!” he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. “Hot
water get-ready, hurry-up-quick!” The roar woke him satisfyingly. He stretched and
scratched his chest and pulled on his shorts and strode out of the hut into the sunlit
clearing all in one easy series of motions. A big, hard-muscled man, he enjoyed using
his well-trained body. Ben, his creechie, had the water ready and steaming over the
fire, as usual, and was squatting staring at nothing, as usual. Creechies never slept,
they just sat and stared. “Breakfast. Hurry-up-quick!” Davidson said, picking up his
razor from the rough board table where the creechie had laid it out ready with a towel
and a propped-up mirror.

There was a lot to be done today, since he’d decided, that last minute before
getting up, to fly down to Central and see the new women for himself. They wouldn’t
last long, 212 among more than two thousand men, and like the first batch, probably
most of them were Colony Brides, and only twenty or thirty had come as Recreation
Staff; but those babies were real good greedy girls and he intended to be first in line
with at least one of them this time. He grinned on the left, the right cheek remaining
stiff to the whining razor.

The old creechie was moseying ’round, taking an hour to bring his breakfast from
the cookhouse. “Hurry-up-quick!” Davidson yelled, and Ben pushed his boneless
saunter into a walk. Ben was about a meter high and his back fur was more white
than green; he was old, and dumb even for a creechie, but Davidson knew how to
handle them; He could tame any of them, if it was worth the effort. It wasn’t, though.

Get enough humans here, build machines and robots, make farms and cities, and
nobody would need the creechies any more. And a good thing too. For this world,
New Tahiti, was literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests
cut down for open fields of grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance
wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth.

And it would be his world. For that’s what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside
him: a world-tamer. He wasn’t a boastful man, but he knew his own size. It just
happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it.

And he always got it.

Breakfast landed warm in his belly. His good mood wasn’t spoiled even by the
sight of Kees Van Sten coming toward him, fat, white, and worried, his eyes sticking
out like blue golf-balls.

“Don,” Kees said without greeting, “the loggers have been hunting red deer in the
Strips again. There are eighteen pair of antlers in the back room of the Lounge.”

“Nobody ever stopped poachers from poaching, Kees.”

“You can stop them. That’s why we live under martial law, that’s why the Army
runs this colony. To keep the laws.”

A frontal attack from Fatty Bigdome! It was almost funny. “All right,” Davidson
said reasonably, “I could stop ’em. But look, it’s the men I’m looking after; that’s my
job, like you said. And it’s the men that count. Not the animals. If a little extra-legal
hunting helps the men get through this godforsaken life, then I intend to blink.
They’ve got to have some recreation.”

“They have games, sports, hobbies, films, teletapes of every major sporting event
of the past century, liquor, marijuana, hallies, and a fresh batch of women at Central,
for those unsatisfied by the Army’s rather unimaginative arrangements for hygienic
homosexuality. They are spoiled rotten, your frontier heroes, and they don’t need to
exterminate a rare native species ‘for recreation.’ If you don’t act, I must record a
major infraction of Ecological Protocols in my report to Captain Godde.”

“You can do that if you see fit, Kees,” said Davidson, who never lost his temper.

It was sort of pathetic the way a euro like Kees got all red in the face when he lost
control of his emotions. “That’s your job, after all. I won’t hold it against you; they
can do the arguing at Central and decide who’s right. See, you want to keep this place
just like it is, actually, Kees. Like one big National Forest. To look at, to study. Great,
you’re a spesh. But see, we’re just ordinary joes getting the work done. Earth needs
wood, needs it bad. We find wood on New Tahiti. So—we’re loggers. See, where we
differ is that with you Earth doesn’t come first, actually. With me it does.”

Kees looked at him sideways out of those blue golf-ball eyes. “Does it? You want
to make this world into Earth’s image, eh? A desert of cement?”

“When I say Earth, Kees, I mean people. Men. You worry about deer and trees
and fibreweed, fine, that’s your thing. But I like to see things in perspective, from the
top down, and the top, so far, is humans. We’re here now; and so this world’s going to
go our way. Like it or not, it’s a fact you have to face; it happens to be the way things
are. Listen, Kees, I’m going to hop down to Central and take a look at the new
colonists. Want to come along?”

“No thanks, Captain Davidson,” the spesh said, going on toward the Lab hut. He
was really mad. All upset about those damn deer. They were great animals, all right.
Davidson’s vivid memory recalled the first one he had seen, here on Smith Land, a
big red shadow, two meters at the shoulder, a crown of narrow golden antlers, a fleet,
brave beast, the finest game animal imaginable. Back on Earth they were using
robodeer even in the High Rockies and Himalaya Parks now, the real ones were about
gone. These things were a hunter’s dream. So they’d be hunted. Hell, even the wild
creechies hunted them, with their lousy little bows. The deer would be hunted
because that’s what they were there for. But poor old bleeding-heart Kees couldn’t
see it. He was actually a smart fellow, but not realistic, not tough-minded enough. He
didn’t see that you’ve got to play on the winning side or else you lose. And it’s Man
that wins, every time. The old Conquistador.

Davidson strode on through the settlement, morning sunlight in his eyes, the
smell of sawn wood and woodsmoke sweet on the warm air. Things looked pretty
neat, for a logging camp. The two hundred men here had tamed a fair patch of
wilderness in just three E-months. Smith Camp: a couple of big corruplast geodesics,
forty timber huts built by creechie-labor, the sawmill, the burner trailing a blue plume
over acres of logs and cut lumber; uphill, the airfield and the big prefab hangar for
helicopters and heavy machinery. That was all. But when they came here there had
been nothing. Trees. A dark huddle and jumble and tangle of trees, endless,
meaningless. A sluggish river overhung and choked by trees, a few creechie-warrens
hidden among the trees, some red deer, hairy monkeys, birds. And trees. Roots, boles,
branches, twigs, leaves, leaves overhead and underfoot and in your face and in your
eyes, endless leaves on endless trees.

New Tahiti was mostly water, warm shallow seas broken here and there by reefs,
islets, archipelagoes, and the five big Lands that lay in a 2500-kilo arc across the
Northwest Quarter-sphere. And all those flecks and blobs of land were covered with
trees. Ocean: forest. That was your choice on New Tahiti. Water and sunlight, or
darkness and leaves.

But men were here now to end the darkness, and turn the tree-jumble into clean
sawn planks, more prized on Earth than gold. Literally, because gold could be got
from seawater and from under the Antarctic ice, but wood could not; wood came only
from trees. And it was a really necessary luxury on Earth. So the alien forests became
wood. Two hundred men with robosaws and haulers had already cut eight mile-wide
Strips on Smith Land, in three months. The stumps of the Strip nearest camp were
already white and punky; chemically treated, they would have fallen into fertile ash
by the time the permanent colonists, the farmers, came to settle Smith Land. All the
farmers would have to do was plant seeds and let ’em sprout.

It had been done once before. That was a queer thing, and the proof, actually, that
New Tahiti was intended for humans to take over. All the stuff here had come from
Earth, about a million years ago, and the evolution had followed so close a path that
you recognized things at once: pine, oak, walnut, chestnut, fir, holly, apple, ash; deer,
bird, mouse, cat, squirrel, monkey. The humanoids on Hain-Davenant of course
claimed they’d done it at the same time as they colonized Earth, but if you listened to
those ETs you’d find they claimed to have settled every planet in the Galaxy and
invented everything from sex to thumbtacks. The theories about Atlantis were a lot
more realistic, and this might well be a lost Atlantean colony. But the humans had
died out. And the nearest thing that had developed from the monkey line to replace
them was the creechie—a meter tall and covered with green fur. As ETs they were
about standard, but as men they were a bust, they just hadn’t made it. Give ’em
another million years, maybe. But the Conquistadors had arrived first. Evolution
moved now not at the pace of a random mutation once a millennium, but with the
speed of the starships of the Terran Fleet.

“Hey Captain!”

Davidson turned, only a microsecond late in his reaction, but that was late enough
to annoy him. There was something about this damn planet, its gold sunlight and
hazy sky, its mild winds smelling of leafmold and pollen, something that made you
daydream. You mooched along thinking about conquistadors and destiny and stuff,
till you were acting as thick and slow as a creechie. “Morning, Ok!” he said crisply to
the logging foreman.

Black and tough as wire rope, Oknanawi Nabo was Kees’ physical opposite, but
he had the same worried look. “You got half a minute?”

“Sure. What’s eating you, Ok?”

“The little bastards.”

They leaned their backsides on a split rail fence. Davidson lit his first reefer of the
day. Sunlight, smoke-blued, slanted warm across the air. The forest behind camp, a
quarter-mile-wide uncut strip, was full of the faint, ceaseless, cracking, chuckling,
stirring, whirring, silvery noises that woods in the morning are full of. It might have
been Idaho in 1950, this clearing. Or Kentucky in 1830. Or Gaul in 50 B.C. “Te-
whet,” said a distant bird.

“I’d like to get rid of ’em, Captain.”

“The creechies? How d’you mean, Ok?”

“Just let ’em go. I can’t get enough work out of ’em in the mill to make up for
their keep. Or for their being such a damn headache. They just don’t work.”

“They do if you know how to make ’em. They built the camp.”

Oknanawi’s obsidian face was dour. “Well, you got the touch with ’em, I guess. I
don’t.” He paused. “In that Applied History course I took in training for Far-out, it
said that slavery never worked. It was uneconomical.”

“Right, but this isn’t slavery, Ok baby. Slaves are humans. When you raise cows,
you call that slavery? No. And it works.”

Impassive, the foreman nodded; but he said, “They’re too little. I tried starving
the sulky ones. They just sit and starve.”

“They’re little, all right, but don’t let ’em fool you, Ok. They’re tough; they’ve
got terrific endurance; and they don’t feel pain like humans. That’s the part you
forget, Ok. You think hitting one is like hitting a kid, sort of. Believe me, it’s more
like hitting a robot for all they feel it. Look, you’ve laid some of the females, you
know how they don’t seem to feel anything, no pleasure, no pain, they just lay there
like mattresses no matter what you do. They’re all like that. Probably they’ve got
more primitive nerves than humans do. Like fish. I’ll tell you a weird one about that.

When I was in Central, before I came up here, one of the tame males jumped me
once. I know they’ll tell you they never fight, but this one went spla, right off his nut,
and lucky he wasn’t armed or he’d have killed me. I had to damn near kill him before
he’d even let go. And he kept coming back. It was incredible the beating he took and
never even felt it. Like some beetle you have to keep stepping on because it doesn’t
know it’s been squashed already. Look at this.” Davidson bent down his close-
cropped head to show a gnarled lump behind one ear. “That was damn near a
concussion. And he did it after I’d broken his arm and pounded his face into
cranberry sauce. He just kept coming back and coming back. The thing is, Ok, the
creechies are lazy, they’re dumb, they’re treacherous, and they don’t feel pain.

You’ve got to be tough with ’em, and stay tough with ’em.”

“They aren’t worth the trouble, Captain. Damn sulky little green bastards, they
won’t fight, won’t work, won’t nothing. Except give me the pip.” There was a
geniality in Oknanawi’s grumbling which did not conceal the stubbornness beneath.

He wouldn’t beat up creechies because they were so much smaller; that was clear in
his mind, and clear now to Davidson, who at once accepted it. He knew how to
handle his men. “Look, Ok. Try this. Pick out the ringleaders and tell ’em you’re
going to give them a shot of hallucinogen. Mesc, lice, any one, they don’t know one
from the other. But they’re scared of them. Don’t overwork it, and it’ll work. I can
guarantee.”

“Why are they scared of hallies?” the foreman asked curiously.

“How do I know? Why are women scared of rats? Don’t look for good sense from
women or creechies, Ok! Speaking of which, I’m on the way to Central this morning,
shall I put the finger on a Collie Girl for you?”

“Just keep the finger off a few till I get my leave,” Ok said grinning. A group of
creechies passed, carrying a long 12 × 12 beam for the Rec Room being built down
by the river. Slow, shambling little figures, they worried the big beam along like a lot
of ants with a dead caterpillar, sullen and inept. Oknanawi watched them and said,
“Fact is, Captain, they give me the creeps.”

That was queer, coming from a tough, quiet guy like Ok.

“Well, I agree with you, actually, Ok, that they’re not worth the trouble, or the
risk. If that fart Lyubov wasn’t around and the Colonel wasn’t so stuck on following
the Code, I think we might just clean out the areas we settle, instead of this Voluntary
Labor routine. They’re going to get rubbed out sooner or later, and it might as well be
sooner. It’s just how things happen to be. Primitive races always have to give way to
civilized ones. Or be assimilated. But we sure as hell can’t assimilate a lot of green
monkeys. And like you say, they’re just bright enough that they’ll never be quite
trustworthy. Like those big monkeys used to live in Africa, what were they called?”

“Gorillas?”

“Right. We’ll get on better without creechies here, just like we get on better
without gorillas in Africa. They’re in our way…But Daddy Ding-Dong he say use
creechie-labor, so we use creechie-labor. For a while. Right? See you tonight, Ok.”

“Right, Captain.”

Davidson checked out the hopper from Smith Camp HQ: a pine-plank 4-meter
cube, two desks, a watercooler, Lt. Birno repairing a walkytalky. “Don’t let the camp
burn down, Birno.”

“Bring me back a Collie, Cap. Blonde. 34-22-36.”

“Christ, is that all?”

“I like ’em neat, not floppy, see.” Birno expressively outlined his preference in
the air. Grinning, Davidson went on up to the hangar. As he brought the helicopter
back over camp he looked down at it: kid’s blocks, sketch-lines of paths, long stump-
stubbled clearings, all shrinking as the machine rose and he saw the green of the
uncut forests of the great island, and beyond that dark green the pale green of the sea
going on and on. Now Smith Camp looked like a yellow spot, a fleck on a vast green
tapestry.

He crossed Smith Straits and the wooded, deep-folded ranges of north Central
Island, and came down by noon in Centralville. It looked like a city, at least after
three months in the woods; there were real streets, real buildings, it had been there
since the Colony began four years ago. You didn’t see what a flimsy little frontier-
town it really was, until you looked south of it a half-mile and saw glittering above
the stumplands and the concrete pads a single golden tower, taller than anything in
Centralville. The ship wasn’t a big one but it looked so big, here. And it was only a
launch, a lander, a ship’s boat; the NAFAL ship of the line, Shackleton, was half a
million kilos up, in orbit. The launch was just a hint, just a fingertip of the hugeness,
the power, the golden precision and grandeur of the star-bridging technology of
Earth.

That was why tears came to Davidson’s eyes for a second at the sight of the ship
from home. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He was a patriotic man, it just happened to be
the way he was made.

Soon enough, walking down those frontier-town streets with their wide vistas of
nothing much at each end, he began to smile. For the women were there, all right, and
you could tell they were fresh ones. They mostly had long tight skirts and big shoes
like goloshes, red or purple or gold, and gold or silver frilly shirts. No more
nipplepeeps. Fashions had changed; too bad. They all wore their hair piled up high, it
must be sprayed with that glue stuff they used. Ugly as hell, but it was the sort of
thing only women would do to their hair, and so it was provocative. Davidson
grinned at a chesty little euraf with more hair than head; he got no smile, but a wag of
the retreating hips that said plainly: Follow follow follow me. But he didn’t. Not yet.

He went to Central HQ: quickstone and plastiplate Standard Issue, 40 offices, 10
watercoolers and a basement arsenal, and checked in with New Tahiti Central
Colonial Administration Command. He met a couple of the launch-crew, put in a
request for a new semirobo bark-stripper at Forestry, and got his old pal Juju Sereng
to meet him at the Luau Bar at fourteen hundred.

He got to the bar an hour early to stock up on a little food before the drinking
began. Lyubov was there, sitting with a couple of guys in Fleet uniform, some kind of
speshes that had come down on the Shackleton’s launch. Davidson didn’t have a high
regard for the Navy, a lot of fancy sunhoppers who left the dirty, muddy, dangerous
on-planet work to the Army; but brass was brass, and anyhow it was funny to see
Lyubov acting chummy with anybody in uniform. He was talking, waving his hands
around the way he did. Just in passing, Davidson tapped his shoulder and said, “Hi,
Raj old pal, how’s tricks?” He went on without waiting for the scowl, though he hated
to miss it. It was really funny the way Lyubov hated him. Probably the guy was
effeminate like a lot of intellectuals, and resented Davidson’s virility. Anyhow
Davidson wasn’t going to waste any time hating Lyubov, he wasn’t worth the trouble.

The Luau served a first-rate venison steak. What would they say on old Earth if
they saw one man eating a kilogram of meat at one meal? Poor damn
soybeansuckers! Then Juju arrived with—as Davidson had confidently expected—the
pick of the new Collie Girls: two fruity beauties, not Brides, but Recreation Staff. Oh
the old Colonial Administration sometimes came through! It was a long, hot
afternoon.

Flying back to camp he crossed Smith Straits level with the sun that lay on top of
a great gold bed of haze over the sea. He sang as he lolled in the pilot’s seat. Smith
Land came in sight hazy, and there was smoke over the camp, a dark smudge as if oil
had got into the waste-burner. He couldn’t even make out the buildings through it. It
was only as he dropped down to the landing-field that he saw the charred jet, the
wrecked hoppers, the burned-out hangar.

He pulled the hopper up again and flew back over the camp, so low that he might
have hit the high cone of the burner, the only thing left sticking up. The rest was
gone, mill, furnace, lumberyards, HQ, huts, barracks, creechie compound, everything.
Black hulks and wrecks, still smoking. But it hadn’t been a forest fire. The forest
stood there, green, next to the ruins. Davidson swung back round to the field, set
down and lit out looking for the motorbike, but it too was a black wreck along with
the stinking, smoldering ruins of the hangar and the machinery. He loped down the
path to camp. As he passed what had been the radio hut, his mind snapped back into
gear. Without hesitating for even a stride he changed course, off the path, behind the
gutted shack. There he stopped. He listened.

There was nobody. It was all silent. The fires had been out a long time; only the
great lumber-piles still smoldered, showing a hot red under the ash and char. Worth
more than gold, those oblong ash-heaps had been. But no smoke rose from the black
skeletons of the barracks and huts; and there were bones among the ashes.

Davidson’s brain was super-clear and active, now, as he crouched behind the
radio shack. There were two possibilities. One: an attack from another camp. Some
officer on King or New Java had gone spla and was trying a coup de planète. Two: an
attack from off-planet. He saw the golden tower on the space-dock at Central. But if
the Shackleton had gone privateer why would she start by rubbing out a small camp,
instead of taking over Centralville? No, it must be invasion, aliens. Some unknown
race, or maybe the Cetians or the Hainish had decided to move in on Earth’s colonies.

He’d never trusted those damned smart humanoids. This must have been done with a
heatbomb. The invading force, with jets, air-cars, nukes, could easily be hidden on an
island or reef anywhere in the SW Quartersphere. He must get back to his hopper and
send out the alarm, then try a look around, reconnoiter, so he could tell HQ his
assessment of the actual situation. He was just straightening up when he heard the
voices.

Not human voices. High, soft, gabble-gobble. Aliens.

Ducking on hands and knees behind the shack’s plastic roof, which lay on the
ground deformed by heat into a batwing shape, he held still and listened.

Four creechies walked by a few yards from him, on the path. They were wild
creechies, naked except for loose leather belts on which knives and pouches hung.

None wore the shorts and leather collar supplied to tame creechies. The Volunteers in
the compound must have been incinerated along with the humans.

They stopped a little way past his hiding place, talking their slow gabble-gobble,
and Davidson held his breath. He didn’t want them to spot him. What the devil were
creechies doing here? They could only be serving as spies and scouts for the invaders.

One pointed south as it talked, and turned, so that Davidson saw its face. And he
recognized it. Creechies all looked alike, but this one was different. He had written
his own signature all over that face, less than a year ago. It was the one that had gone
spla and attacked him down in Central, the homicidal one, Lyubov’s pet. What in the
blue hell was it doing here?

Davidson’s mind raced, clicked; reactions fast as always, he stood up, sudden,
tall, easy, gun in hand. “You creechies. Stop. Stay-put. No moving!”

His voice cracked out like a whiplash. The four little green creatures did not
move. The one with the smashed-in face looked at him across the black rubble with
huge, blank eyes that had no light in them.

“Answer now. This fire, who start it?”

No answer.

“Answer now: hurry-up-quick! No answer, then I burn-up first one, then one, then
one, see? This fire, who start it?”

“We burned the camp, Captain Davidson,” said the one from Central, in a queer
soft voice that reminded Davidson of some human. “The humans are all dead.”

“You burned it, what do you mean?”

He could not recall Scarface’s name for some reason.

“There were two hundred humans here. Ninety slaves of my people. Nine
hundred of my people came out of the forest. First we killed the humans in the place
in the forest where they were cutting trees, then we killed those in this place, while
the houses were burning. I had thought you were killed. I am glad to see you, Captain
Davidson.”

It was all crazy, and of course a lie. They couldn’t have killed all of them, Ok,
Birno, Van Sten, all the rest, two hundred men, some of them would have got out. All
the creechies had were bows and arrows. Anyway the creechies couldn’t have done
this. Creechies didn’t fight, didn’t kill, didn’t have wars. They were intraspecies non-
aggressive, that meant sitting ducks. They didn’t fight back. They sure as hell didn’t
massacre two hundred men at a swipe. It was crazy. The silence, the faint stink of
burning in the long, warm evening light, the pale-green faces with unmoving eyes
that watched him, it all added up to nothing, to a crazy bad dream, a nightmare.

“Who did this for you?”

“Nine hundred of my people,” Scarface said in that damned fake-human voice.

“No, not that. Who else? Who were you acting for? Who told you what to do?”

“My wife did.”

Davidson saw then the telltale tension of the creature’s stance, yet it sprang at him
so lithe and oblique that his shot missed, burning an arm or shoulder instead of smack
between the eyes. And the creechie was on him, half his size and weight yet knocking
him right off balance by its onslaught, for he had been relying on the gun and not
expecting attack. The thing’s arms were thin, tough, coarse-furred in his grip, and as
he struggled with it, it sang.

He was down on his back, pinned down, disarmed. Four green muzzles looked
down at him. The scarfaced one was still singing, a breathless gabble, but with a tune
to it. The other three listened, their white teeth showing in grins. He had never seen a
creechie smile. He had never looked up into a creechie’s face from below. Always
down, from above. From on top. He tried not to struggle, for at the moment it was
wasted effort. Little as they were, they outnumbered him, and Scarface had his gun.

He must wait. But there was a sickness in him, a nausea that made his body twitch
and strain against his will. The small hands held him down effortlessly, the small
green faces bobbed over him grinning.

Scarface ended his song. He knelt on Davidson’s chest, a knife in one hand,
Davidson’s gun in the other.

“You can’t sing, Captain Davidson, is that right? Well, then, you may run to your
hopper and fly away, and tell the Colonel in Central that this place is burned and the
humans are all killed.”

Blood, the same startling red as human blood, clotted the fur of the creechie’s
right arm, and the knife shook in the green paw. The sharp, scarred face looked down
into Davidson’s from very close, and he could see now the queer light that burned
way down in the charcoal-dark eyes. The voice was still soft and quiet.

They let him go.

He got up cautiously, still dizzy from the fall Scarface had given him. The
creechies stood well away from him now, knowing his reach was twice theirs; but
Scarface wasn’t the only one armed, there was a second gun pointing at his guts. That
was Ben holding the gun. His own creechie, Ben, the little gray mangy bastard,
looking stupid as always but holding a gun.

It’s hard to turn your back on two pointing guns, but Davidson did it and started
walking toward the field.

A voice behind him said some creechie word, shrill and loud. Another said,
“Hurry-up-quick!” and there was a queer noise like birds twittering that must be
creechie laughter. A shot clapped and whined on the road right by him. Christ, it
wasn’t fair, they had the guns and he wasn’t armed. He began to run. He could outrun
any creechie. They didn’t know how to shoot a gun.

“Run,” said the quiet voice far behind him. That was Scarface. Selver, that was
his name. Sam, they’d called him, till Lyubov stopped Davidson from giving him
what he deserved and made a pet out of him, then they’d called him Selver. Christ,
what was all this, it was a nightmare. He ran. The blood thundered in his ears. He ran
through the golden, smoky evening. There was a body by the path, he hadn’t even
noticed it coming. It wasn’t burned, it looked like a white balloon with the air gone
out. It had staring blue eyes. They didn’t dare kill him, Davidson. They hadn’t shot at
him again. It was impossible. They couldn’t kill him. There was the hopper, safe and
shining, and he lunged into the seat and had her up before the creechies could try
anything. His hands shook, but not much, just shock. They couldn’t kill him. He
circled the hill and then came back fast and low, looking for the four creechies. But
nothing moved in the streaky rubble of the camp.

There had been a camp there this morning. Two hundred men. There had been
four creechies there just now. He hadn’t dreamed all this. They couldn’t just
disappear. They were there, hiding. He opened up the machinegun in the hopper’s
nose and raked the burned ground, shot holes in the green leaves of the forest, strafed
the burned bones and cold bodies of his men and the wrecked machinery and the
rotting white stumps, returning again and again until the ammo was gone and the
gun’s spasms stopped short.

Davidson’s hands were steady now, his body felt appeased, and he knew he
wasn’t caught in any dream. He headed back over the Straits, to take the news to
Centralville. As he flew he could feel his face relax into its usual calm lines. They
couldn’t blame the disaster on him, for he hadn’t even been there. Maybe they’d see
that it was significant that the creechies had struck while he was gone, knowing
they’d fail if he was there to organize the defense. And there was one good thing that
would come out of this. They’d do like they should have done to start with, and clean
up the planet for human occupation. Not even Lyubov could stop them from rubbing
out the creechies now, not when they heard it was Lyubov’s pet creechie who’d led
the massacre! They’d go in for rat-extermination for a while, now; and maybe, just
maybe, they’d hand that little job over to him. At that thought he could have smiled.

But he kept his face calm.

The sea under him was grayish with twilight, and ahead of him lay the island
hills, the deep-folded, many-streamed, many-leaved forests in the dusk.

Chapter Two

ALL the colors of rust and sunset, brown-reds and pale greens, changed ceaselessly in
the long leaves as the wind blew. The roots of the copper willows, thick and ridged,
were moss-green down by the running water, which like the wind moved slowly with
many soft eddies and seeming pauses, held back by rocks, roots, hanging and fallen
leaves. No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight,
starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the
complex. Little paths ran under the branches, around the boles, over the roots; they
did not go straight, but yielded to every obstacle, devious as nerves. The ground was
not dry and solid but damp and rather springy, product of the collaboration of living
things with the long, elaborate death of leaves and trees; and from that rich graveyard
grew ninety-foot trees, and tiny mushrooms that sprouted in circles half an inch
across. The smell of the air was subtle, various, and sweet. The view was never long,
unless looking up through the branches you caught sight of the stars. Nothing was
pure, dry, arid, plain. Revelation was lacking. There was no seeing everything at
once: no certainty. The colors of rust and sunset kept changing in the hanging leaves
of the copper willows, and you could not say even whether the leaves of the willows
were brownish-red, or reddish-green, or green.

Selver came up a path beside the water, going slowly and often stumbling on the
willow roots. He saw an old man dreaming, and stopped. The old man looked at him
through the long willow-leaves and saw him in his dreams.

“May I come to your Lodge, my Lord Dreamer? I’ve come a long way.”

The old man sat still. Presently Selver squatted down on his heels just off the
path, beside the stream. His head drooped down, for he was worn out and had to
sleep. He had been walking five days.

“Are you of the dream-time or of the world-time?” the old man asked at last.

“Of the world-time.”

“Come along with me then.” The old man got up promptly and led Selver up the
wandering path out of the willow grove into dryer, darker regions of oak and thorn. “I
took you for a god,” he said, going a pace ahead. “And it seemed to me I had seen
you before, perhaps in dream.”

“Not in the world-time. I come from Sornol, I have never been here before.”

“This town is Cadast. I am Coro Mena. Of the Whitethorn.”

“Selver is my name. Of the Ash.”

“There are Ash people among us, both men and women. Also your marriage-
clans, Birch and Holly; we have no women of the Apple. But you don’t come looking
for a wife, do you?”

“My wife is dead,” Selver said.

They came to the Men’s Lodge, on high ground in a stand of young oaks. They
stooped and crawled through the tunnel-entrance. Inside, in the firelight, the old man
stood up, but Selver stayed crouching on hands and knees, unable to rise. Now that
help and comfort was at hand, his body, which he had forced too far, would not go
farther. It lay down and the eyes closed; and Selver slipped, with relief and gratitude,
into the great darkness.

The men of the Lodge of Cadast looked after him, and their healer came to tend
the wound in his right arm. In the night Coro Mena and the healer Torber sat by the
fire. Most of the other men were with their wives that night; there were only a couple
of young prentice-dreamers over on the benches, and they had both gone fast asleep.

“I don’t know what would give a man such scars as he has on his face,” said the
healer, “and much less, such a wound as that in his arm. A very queer wound.”

“It’s a queer engine he wore on his belt,” said Coro Mena.

“I saw it and didn’t see it.”

“I put it under his bench. It looks like polished iron, but not like the handiwork of
men.”

“He comes from Sornol, he said to you.”

They were both silent a while. Coro Mena felt unreasoning fear press upon him,
and slipped into dream to find the reason for the fear; for he was an old man, and long
adept. In the dream the giants walked, heavy and dire. Their dry scaly limbs were
swathed in cloths; their eyes were little and light, like tin beads. Behind them crawled
huge moving things made of polished iron. The trees fell down in front of them.

Out from among the falling trees a man ran, crying aloud, with blood on his
mouth. The path he ran on was the doorpath of the Lodge of Cadast.

“Well, there’s little doubt of it,” Coro Mena said, sliding out of the dream. “He
came oversea straight from Sornol, or else came afoot from the coast of Kelme Deva
on our own land. The giants are in both those places, travelers say.”

“Will they follow him,” said Torber; neither answered the question, which was no
question but a statement of possibility.

“You saw the giants once, Coro?”

“Once,” the old man said.

He dreamed; sometimes, being very old and not so strong as he had been, he
slipped off to sleep for a while. Day broke, noon passed. Outside the Lodge a
hunting-party went out, children chirped, women talked in voices like running water.

A dryer voice called Coro Mena from the door. He crawled out into the evening
sunlight. His sister stood outside, sniffing the aromatic wind with pleasure, but
looking stern all the same. “Has the stranger waked up, Coro?”

“Not yet. Torber’s looking after him.”

“We must hear his story.”

“No doubt he’ll wake soon.”

Ebor Dendep frowned. Headwoman of Cadast, she was anxious for her people;
but she did not want to ask that a hurt man be disturbed, nor to offend the Dreamers
by insisting on her right to enter their Lodge. “Can’t you wake him, Coro?” she asked
at last. “What if he is…being pursued?”

He could not run his sister’s emotions on the same rein with his own, yet he felt
them; her anxiety bit him. “If Torber permits, I will,” he said.

“Try to learn his news, quickly. I wish he was a woman and would talk sense…”

The stranger had roused himself, and lay feverish in the halfdark of the Lodge.

The unreined dreams of illness moved in his eyes. He sat up, however, and spoke
with control. As he listened, Coro Mena’s bones seemed to shrink within him, trying
to hide from this terrible story, this new thing.

“I was Selver Thele, when I lived in Eshreth in Sornol. My city was destroyed by
the yumens when they cut down the trees in that region. I was one of those made to
serve them, with my wife, Thele. She was raped by one of them and died. I attacked
the yumen that killed her. He would have killed me then, but another of them saved
me and set me free. I left Sornol, where no town is safe from the yumens now, and
came here to the North Isle, and lived on the coast of Kelme Deva in the Red Groves.

There presently the yumens came and began to cut down the world. They destroyed a
city there, Penle. They caught a hundred of the men and women and made them serve
them, and live in the pen. I was not caught. I lived with others who had escaped from
Penle, in the bogland north of Kelme Deva. Sometimes at night I went among the
people in the yumen’s pens. They told me that one was there. That one whom I had
tried to kill. I thought at first to try again; or else to set the people in the pen free. But
all the time I watched the trees fall and saw the world cut open and left to rot. The
men might have escaped, but the women were locked in more safely and could not,
and they were beginning to die. I talked with the people hiding there in the boglands.

We were all very frightened and very angry, and had no way to let our fear and anger
free. So at last after long talking, and long dreaming, and the making of a plan, we
went in daylight, and killed the yumens of Kelme Deva with arrows and hunting-
lances, and burned their city and their engines. We left nothing. But that one had gone
away. He came back alone. I sang over him, and let him go.”

Selver fell silent.

“Then,” Coro Mena whispered.

“Then a flying ship came from Sornol, and hunted us in the forest, but found
nobody. So they set fire to the forest; but it rained, and they did little harm. Most of
the people freed from the pens and the others have gone farther north and east,
toward the Holle Hills, for we were afraid many yumens might come hunting us. I
went alone. The yumens know me, you see, they know my face; and this frightens
me, and those I stay with.”

“What is your wound?” Torber asked.

“That one, he shot me with their kind of weapon; but I sang him down and let him
go.”

“Alone you downed a giant?” said Torber with a fierce grin, wishing to believe.

“Not alone. With three hunters, and with his weapon in my hand—this.”

Torber drew back from the thing.

None of them spoke for a while. At last Coro Mena said, “What you tell us is very
black, and the road goes down. Are you a Dreamer of your Lodge?”

“I was. There’s no Lodge of Eshreth any more.”

“That’s all one; we speak the Old Tongue together. Among the willows of Asta
you first spoke to me calling me Lord Dreamer. So I am. Do you dream, Selver?”

“Seldom now,” Selver answered, obedient to the catechism, his scarred, feverish
face bowed.

“Awake?”

“Awake.”

“Do you dream well, Selver?”

“Not well.”

“Do you hold the dream in your hands?”

“Yes.”

“Do you weave and shape, direct and follow, start and cease at will?”

“Sometimes, not always.”

“Can you walk the road your dream goes?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.”

“Who is not? It is not altogether bad with you, Selver.”

“No, it is altogether bad,” Selver said, “there’s nothing good left,” and he began
to shake.

Torber gave him the willow-draft to drink and made him lie down. Coro Mena
still had the headwoman’s question to ask; reluctantly he did so, kneeling by the sick
man. “Will the giants, the yumens you call them, will they follow your trail, Selver?”

“I left no trail. No one has seen me between Kelme Deva and this place, six days.

That’s not the danger.” He struggled to sit up again. “Listen, listen. You don’t see the
danger. How can you see it? You haven’t done what I did, you have never dreamed of
it, making two hundred people die. They will not follow me, but they may follow us
all. Hunt us, as hunters drive coneys. That is the danger. They may try to kill us. To
kill us all, all men.”

“Lie down—”

“No, I’m not raving, this is true fact and dream. There were two hundred yumens
at Kelme Deva and they are dead. We killed them. We killed them as if they were not
men. So will they not turn and do the same? They have killed us by ones, now they
will kill us as they kill the trees, by hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds.”

“Be still,” Torber said. “Such things happen in the fever-dream, Selver. They do
not happen in the world.”

“The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots. Selver, how
is it with these creatures, then? They look like men and talk like men, are they not
men?”

“I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own
kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one
who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like
ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They
will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore
I saw fit to put them to death.”

“And all men’s dreams,” said Coro Mena, cross-legged in shadow, “will be
changed. They will never be the same again. I shall never walk again that path I came
with you yesterday, the way up from the willow grove that I’ve walked on all my life.

It is changed. You have walked on it and it is utterly changed. Before this day the
thing we had to do was the right thing to do; the way we had to go was the right way
and led us home. Where is our home now? For you’ve done what you had to do, and
it was not right. You have killed men. I saw them, five years ago, in the Lemgan
Valley, where they came in a flying ship; I hid and watched the giants, six of them,
and saw them speak, and look at rocks and plants, and cook food. They are men. But
you have lived among them, tell me, Selver: do they dream?”

“As children do, in sleep.”

“They have no training?”

“No. Sometimes they talk of their dreams, the healers try to use them in healing,
but none of them are trained, or have any skill in dreaming. Lyubov, who taught me,
understood me when I showed him how to dream, and yet even so he called the
world-time ‘real’ and the dream-time ‘unreal,’ as if that were the difference between
them.”

“You have done what you had to do,” Coro Mena repeated after a silence. His
eyes met Selver’s, across shadows. The desperate tension lessened in Selver’s face;
his scarred mouth relaxed, and he lay back without saying more. In a little while he
was asleep.

“He’s a god,” Coro Mena said.

Torber nodded, accepting the old man’s judgment almost with relief.

“But not like the others. Not like the Pursuer, nor the Friend who has no face, nor
the Aspen-leaf Woman who walks in the forest of dreams. He is not the Gatekeeper,
nor the Snake. Nor the Lyre-player nor the Carver nor the Hunter, though he comes in
the world-time like them. We may have dreamed of Selver these last few years, but
we shall no longer; he has left the dream-time. In the forest, through the forest he
comes, where leaves fall, where trees fall, a god that knows death, a god that kills and
is not himself reborn.”

The headwoman listened to Coro Mena’s reports and prophecies, and acted. She
put the town of Cadast on alert, making sure that each family was ready to move out,
with some food packed, and litters ready for the old and ill. She sent young women
scouting south and east for news of the yumens. She kept one armed hunting-group
always around town, though the others went out as usual every night. And when
Selver grew stronger she insisted that he come out of the Lodge and tell his story:
how the yumens killed and enslaved people in Sornol, and cut down the forests; how
the people of Kelme Deva had killed the yumens. She forced women and undreaming
men who did not understand these things to listen again, until they understood, and
were frightened. For Ebor Dendep was a practical woman. When a Great Dreamer,
her brother, told her that Selver was a god, a changer, a bridge between realities, she
believed and acted. It was the Dreamer’s responsibility to be careful, to be certain that
his judgment was true. Her responsibility was then to take that judgment and act upon
it. He saw what must be done; she saw that it was done.

“All the cities of the forest must hear,” Coro Mena said. So the headwoman sent
out her young runners, and headwomen in other towns listened, and sent out their
runners. The killing at Kelme Deva and the name of Selver went over North Island
and oversea to the other lands, from voice to voice, or in writing; not very fast, for the
Forest People had no quicker messengers than footrunners; yet fast enough.

They were not all one people on the Forty Lands of the world. There were more
languages than lands, and each with a different dialect for every town that spoke it;
there were infinite ramifications of manners, morals, customs, crafts; physical types
differed on each of the five Great Lands. The people of Sornol were tall, and pale,
and great traders; the people of Rieshwel were short, and many had black fur, and
they ate monkeys; and so on and on. But the climate varied little, and the forest little,
and the sea not at all. Curiosity, regular trade-routes, and the necessity of finding a
husband or wife of the proper Tree, kept up an easy movement of people among the
towns and between the lands, and so there were certain likenesses among all but the
remotest extremes, the half-rumored barbarian isles of the Far East and South. In all
the Forty Lands, women ran the cities and towns, and almost every town had a Men’s
Lodge. Within the Lodges the Dreamers spoke an old tongue, and this varied little
from land to land. It was rarely learned by women or by men who remained hunters,
fishers, weavers, builders, those who dreamed only small dreams outside the Lodge.

As most writing was in this Lodge-tongue, when headwomen sent fleet girls carrying
messages, the letters went from Lodge to Lodge, and so were interpreted by the
Dreamers to the Old Women, as were other documents, rumors, problems, myths, and
dreams. But it was always the Old Women’s choice whether to believe or not.

Selver was in a small room at Eshsen. The door was not locked, but he knew if he
opened it something bad would come in. So long as he kept it shut everything would
be all right. The trouble was that there were young trees, a sapling orchard, planted
out in front of the house; not fruit or nut trees but some other kind, he could not
remember what kind. He went out to see what kind of trees they were. They all lay
broken and uprooted. He picked up the silvery branch of one and a little blood ran out
of the broken end. No, not here, not again, Thele, he said: O Thele, come to me
before your death! But she did not come. Only her death was there, the broken
birchtree, the opened door. Selver turned and went quickly back into the house,
discovering that it was all built above ground like a yumen house, very tall and full of
light. Outside the other door, across the tall room, was the long street of the yumen
city Central. Selver had the gun in his belt. If Davidson came, he could shoot him. He
waited, just inside the open door, looking out into the sunlight. Davidson came, huge,
running so fast that Selver could not keep him in the sights of the gun as he doubled
crazily back and forth across the wide street, very fast, always closer. The gun was
heavy. Selver fired it but no fire came out of it, and in rage and terror he threw the
gun and the dream away.

Disgusted and depressed, he spat, and sighed.

“A bad dream?” Ebor Dendep inquired.

“They’re all bad, and all the same,” he said, but the deep unease and misery
lessened a little as he answered. Cool morning sunlight fell flecked and shafted
through the fine leaves and branches of the birch grove of Cadast. There the
headwoman sat weaving a basket of blackstem fern, for she liked to keep her fingers
busy, while Selver lay beside her in halfdream and dream. He had been fifteen days at
Cadast, and his wound was healing well. He still slept much, but for the first time in
many months he had begun to dream waking again, regularly, not once or twice in a
day and night but in the true pulse and rhythm of dreaming which should rise and fall
ten to fourteen times in the diurnal cycle. Bad as his dreams were, all terror and
shame, yet he welcomed them. He had feared that he was cut off from his roots, that
he had gone too far into the dead land of action ever to find his way back to the
springs of reality. Now, though the water was very bitter, he drank again.

Briefly he had Davidson down again among the ashes of the burned camp, and
instead of singing over him this time he hit him in the mouth with a rock. Davidson’s
teeth broke, and blood ran between the white splinters.

The dream was useful, a straight wish-fulfillment, but he stopped it there, having
dreamed it many times, before he met Davidson in the ashes of Kelme Deva, and
since. There was nothing to that dream but relief. A sip of bland water. It was the
bitter he needed. He must go clear back, not to Kelme Deva but to the long dreadful
street in the alien city called Central, where he had attacked Death, and had been
defeated.

Ebor Dendep hummed as she worked. Her thin hands, their silky green down
silvered with age, worked black fern-stems in and out, fast and neat. She sang a song
about gathering ferns, a girl’s song: I’m picking ferns, I wonder if he’ll come back…

Her faint old voice trilled like a cricket’s. Sun trembled in birch leaves. Selver put his
head down on his arms.

The birch grove was more or less in the center of the town of Cadast. Eight paths
led away from it, winding narrowly off among trees. There was a whiff of
woodsmoke in the air; where the branches were thin at the south edge of the grove
you could see smoke rise from a house-chimney, like a bit of blue yarn unravelling
among the leaves. If you looked closely among the live-oaks and other trees you
would find houseroofs sticking up a couple of feet above ground, between a hundred
and two hundred of them, it was very hard to count. The timber houses were three-
quarters sunk, fitted in among tree-roots like badgers’ setts. The beam roofs were
mounded over with a thatch of small branches, pinestraw, reeds, earth-mold. They
were insulating, waterproof, almost invisible. The forest and the community of eight
hundred people went about their business all around the birch grove where Ebor
Dendep sat making a basket of fern. A bird among the branches over her head said,
“Te-whet,” sweetly. There was more people-noise than usual, for fifty or sixty
strangers, young men and women mostly, had come drifting in these last few days,
drawn by Selver’s presence. Some were from other cities of the North, some were
those who had done the killing at Kelme Deva with him; they had followed rumor
here to follow him. Yet the voices calling here and there and the babble of women
bathing or children playing down by the stream, were not so loud as the morning
birdsong and insect-drone and under-noise of the living forest of which the town was
one element.

A girl came quickly, a young huntress the color of the pale birch leaves. “Word of
mouth from the southern coast, mother,” she said. “The runner’s at the Women’s
Lodge.”

“Send her here when she’s eaten,” the headwoman said softly. “Sh, Tolbar, can’t
you see he’s asleep?”

The girl stooped to pick a large leaf of wild tobacco, and laid it lightly over
Selver’s eyes, on which a shaft of the steepening, bright sunlight had fallen. He lay
with his hands half open and his scarred, damaged face turned upward, vulnerable
and foolish, a Great Dreamer gone to sleep like a child. But it was the girl’s face that
Ebor Dendep watched. It shone, in that uneasy shade, with pity and terror, with
adoration.

Tolbar darted away. Presently two of the Old Women came with the messenger,
moving silent in single file along the sun-flecked path. Ebor Dendep raised her hand,
enjoining silence. The messenger promptly lay down flat, and rested; her brown-
dappled green fur was dusty and sweaty, she had run far and fast. The Old Women sat
down in patches of sun, and became still. Like two old gray-green stones they sat
there, with bright living eyes.

Selver, struggling with a sleep-dream beyond his control, cried out as if in great
fear, and woke.

He went to drink from the stream; when he came back he was followed by six or
seven of those who always followed him. The headwoman put down her half-finished
work and said, “Now be welcome, runner, and speak.”

The runner stood up, bowed her head to Ebor Dendep, and spoke her message: “I
come from Trethat. My words come from Sorbron Deva, before that from sailors of
the Strait, before that from Broter in Sornol. They are for the hearing of all Cadast but
they are to be spoken to the man called Selver who was born of the Ash in Eshreth.

Here are the words: There are new giants in the great city of the giants in Sornol, and
many of these new ones are females. The yellow ship of fire goes up and down at the
place that was called Peha. It is known in Sornol that Selver of Eshreth burned the
city of the giants at Kelme Deva. The Great Dreamers of the Exiles in Broter have
dreamed giants more numerous than the trees of the Forty Lands. These are all the
words of the message I bear.”

After the singsong recitation they were all silent. The bird, a little farther off, said,
“Whet-whet?” experimentally.

“This is a very bad world-time,” said one of the Old Women, rubbing a rheumatic
knee.

A gray bird flew from a huge oak that marked the north edge of town, and went
up in circles, riding the morning updraft on lazy wings. There was always a roosting-
tree of these gray kites near a town; they were the garbage service.

A small, fat boy ran through the birch grove, pursued by a slightly larger sister,
both shrieking in tiny voices like bats. The boy fell down and cried, the girl stood him
up and scrubbed his tears off with a large leaf. They scuttled off into the forest hand
in hand.

“There was one called Lyubov,” Selver said to the headwoman. “I have spoken of
him to Coro Mena, but not to you. When that one was killing me, it was Lyubov who
saved me. It was Lyubov who healed me, and set me free. He wanted to know about
us; so I would tell him what he asked, and he too would tell me what I asked. Once I
asked how his race could survive, having so few women. He said that in the place
where they come from, half the race is women; but the men would not bring women
to the Forty Lands until they had made a place ready for them.”

“Until the men made a fit place for the women? Well! they may have quite a
wait,” said Ebor Dendep. “They’re like the people in the Elm Dream who come at
you rump-first, with their heads put on front to back. They make the forest into a dry
beach”—her language had no word for ‘desert’—“and call that making things ready
for the women? They should have sent the women first. Maybe with them the women
do the Great Dreaming, who knows? They are backward, Selver. They are insane.”

“A people can’t be insane.”

“But they only dream in sleep, you said; if they want to dream waking they take
poisons so that the dreams go out of control, you said! How can people be any
madder? They don’t know the dream-time from the world-time, any more than a baby
does. Maybe when they kill a tree they think it will come alive again!”

Selver shook his head. He still spoke to the headwoman as if he and she were
alone in the birch grove, in a quiet hesitant voice, almost drowsily.

“No, they
understand death very well…Certainly they don’t see as we do, but they know more
and understand more about certain things than we do. Lyubov mostly understood
what I told him. Much of what he told me, I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t the
language that kept me from understanding; I know his tongue, and he learned ours;
we made a writing of the two languages together. Yet there were things he said I
could never understand. He said the yumens are from outside the forest. That’s quite
clear. He said they want the forest: the trees for wood, the land to plant grass on.”
Selver’s voice, though still soft, had taken on resonance; the people among the silver
trees listened. “That too is clear, to those of us who’ve seen them cutting down the
world. He said the yumens are men like us, that we’re indeed related, as close kin
maybe as the Red Deer to the Greybuck. He said that they come from another place
which is not the forest; the trees there are all cut down; it has a sun, not our sun,
which is a star. All this, as you see, wasn’t clear to me. I say his words but don’t
know what they mean. It does not matter much. It is clear that they want our forest
for themselves. They are twice our stature, they have weapons that outshoot ours by
far, and firethrowers, and flying ships. Now they have brought more women, and will
have children. There are maybe two thousand, maybe three thousand of them here
now, mostly in Sornol. But if we wait a lifetime or two they will breed; their numbers
will double and redouble. They kill men and women; they do not spare those who ask
life. They cannot sing in contest. They have left their roots behind them, perhaps, in
this other forest from which they came, this forest with no trees. So they take poison
to let loose the dreams in them, but it only makes them drunk or sick. No one can say
certainly whether they’re men or not men, whether they’re sane or insane, but that
does not matter. They must be made to leave the forest, because they are dangerous.

If they will not go they must be burned out of the Lands, as nests of stinging-ants
must be burned out of the groves of cities. If we wait, it is we that will be smoked out
and burned. They can step on us as we step on stinging-ants. Once I saw a woman, it
was when they burned my city Eshreth, she lay down in the path before a yumen to
ask him for life, and he stepped on her back and broke the spine, and then kicked her
aside as if she was a dead snake. I saw that. If the yumens are men, they are men unfit
or untaught to dream and to act as men. Therefore they go about in torment killing
and destroying, driven by the gods within, whom they will not set free but try to
uproot and deny. If they are men, they are evil men, having denied their own gods,
afraid to see their own faces in the dark. Headwoman of Cadast, hear me.” Selver
stood up, tall and abrupt among the seated women. “It’s time, I think, that I go back
to my own land, to Sornol, to those that are in exile and those that are enslaved. Tell
any people who dream of a city burning to come after me to Broter.” He bowed to
Ebor Dendep and left the birch grove, still walking lame, his arm bandaged; yet there
was a quickness to his walk, a poise to his head, that made him seem more whole
than other men. The young people followed quietly after him.

“Who is he?” asked the runner from Trethat, her eyes following him.

“The man to whom your message came, Selver of Eshreth, a god among us. Have
you ever seen a god before, daughter?”

“When I was ten, the Lyre-Player came to our town.”

“Old Ertel, yes. He was of my Tree, and from the North Vales like me. Well, now
you’ve seen a second god, and a greater. Tell your people in Trethat of him.”

“Which god is he, mother?”

“A new one,” Ebor Dendep said in her dry old voice. “The son of forest-fire, the
brother of the murdered. He is the one who is not reborn. Now go on, all of you, go
on to the Lodge. See who’ll be going with Selver, see about food for them to carry.
Let me be a while. I’m as full of forebodings as a stupid old man, I must dream…”

Coro Mena went with Selver that night as far as the place where they first met,
under the copper willows by the stream. Many people were following Selver south,
some sixty in all, as great a troop as most people had ever seen on the move at once.
They would cause great stir and thus gather many more to them, on their way to the
sea-crossing to Sornol. Selver had claimed his Dreamer’s privilege of solitude for this
one night. He was setting off alone. His followers would catch him up in the
morning; and thenceforth, implicated in crowd and act, he would have little time for
the slow and deep running of the great dreams.

“Here we met,” the old man said, stopping among the bowing branches, the veils
of drooping leaves, “and here part. This will be called Selver’s Grove, no doubt, by
the people who walk our paths hereafter.”

Selver said nothing for a while, standing still as a tree, the restless leaves about
him darkening from silver as clouds thickened over the stars. “You are surer of me
than I am,” he said at last, a voice in darkness.

“Yes, I’m sure, Selver…I was well taught in dreaming, and then I’m old. I dream
very little for myself any more. Why should I? Little is new to me. And what I
wanted from my life, I have had, and more. I have had my whole life. Days like the
leaves of the forest. I’m an old hollow tree, only the roots live. And so I dream only
what all men dream. I have no visions and no wishes. I see what is. I see the fruit
ripening on the branch. Four years it has been ripening, that fruit of the deep-planted
tree. We have all been afraid for four years, even we who live far from the yumens’
cities, and have only glimpsed them from hiding, or seen their ships fly over, or
looked at the dead places where they cut down the world, or heard mere tales of these
things. We are all afraid. Children wake from sleep crying of giants; women will not
go far on their trading-journeys; men in the Lodges cannot sing. The fruit of fear is
ripening. And I see you gather it. You are the harvester. All that we fear to know, you
have seen, you have known: exile, shame, pain, the roof and walls of the world fallen,
the mother dead in misery, the children untaught, uncherished…This is a new time
for the world: a bad time. And you have suffered it all. You have gone farthest. And
at the farthest, at the end of the black path, there grows the Tree; there the fruit
ripens; now you reach up, Selver, now you gather it. And the world changes wholly,
when a man holds in his hand the fruit of that tree, whose roots are deeper than the
forest. Men will know it. They will know you, as we did. It doesn’t take an old man
or a Great Dreamer to recognize a god! Where you go, fire burns; only the blind
cannot see it. But listen, Selver, this is what I see that perhaps others do not, this is
why I have loved you: I dreamed of you before we met here. You were walking on a
path, and behind you the young trees grew up, oak and birch, willow and holly, fir
and pine, alder, elm, white-flowering ash, all the roof and walls of the world, forever
renewed. Now farewell, dear god and son, go safely.”

The night darkened as Selver went, until even his night-seeing eyes saw nothing
but masses and planes of black. It began to rain. He had gone only a few miles from
Cadast when he must either light a torch, or halt. He chose to halt, and groping found
a place among the roots of a great chestnut tree. There he sat, his back against the
broad, twisting bole that seemed to hold a little sun-warmth in it still. The fine rain,
falling unseen in darkness, pattered on the leaves overhead, on his arms and neck and
head protected by their thick silk-fine hair, on the earth and ferns and undergrowth
nearby, on all the leaves of the forest, near and far. Selver sat as quiet as the gray owl
on a branch above him, unsleeping, his eyes wide open in the rainy dark.

Chapter Three

CAPTAIN Raj Lyubov had a headache. It began softly in the muscles of his right
shoulder, and mounted crescendo to a smashing drumbeat over his right ear. The
speech centers are in the left cerebral cortex, he thought, but he couldn’t have said it;
couldn’t speak, or read, or sleep, or think. Cortex, vortex. Migraine headache,
margarine breadache, ow, ow, ow. Of course he had been cured of migraine once at
college and again during his obligatory Army Prophylactic Psychotherapy Sessions,
but he had brought along some ergotamine pills when he left Earth, just in case. He
had taken two, and a superhyperduper-analgesic, and a tranquilizer, and a digestive
pill to counteract the caffeine which counteracted the ergotamine, but the awl still
bored out from within, just over his right ear, to the beat of the big bass drum. Awl,
drill, ill, pill, oh God. Lord deliver us. Liver sausage. What would the Athsheans do
for a migraine? They wouldn’t have one, they would have daydreamed the tensions
away a week before they got them. Try it, try daydreaming. Begin as Selver taught
you. Although knowing nothing of electricity he could not really grasp the principle
of the EEG, as soon as he heard about alpha waves and when they appear he had said,
“Oh yes, you mean this,” and there appeared the unmistakable alpha-squiggles on the
graph recording what went on inside his small green head; and he had taught Lyubov
how to turn on and off the alpha-rhythms in one half-hour lesson. There really was
nothing to it. But not now, the world is too much with us, ow, ow, ow above the right
ear I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, for the Athsheans had burned
Smith Camp day before yesterday and killed two hundred men. Two hundred and
seven to be precise. Every man alive except the Captain. No wonder pills couldn’t get
at the center of his migraine, for it was on an island two hundred miles away two
days ago. Over the hills and far away. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. And among the
ashes, all his knowledge of the High Intelligence Life Forms of World 41. Dust,
rubbish, a mess of false data and fake hypotheses. Nearly five E-years here, and he
had believed the Athsheans to be incapable of killing men, his kind or their kind. He
had written long papers to explain how and why they couldn’t kill men. All wrong.
Dead wrong.

What had he failed to see?

It was nearly time to be going over to the meeting at HQ. Cautiously Lyubov
stood up, moving all in one piece so that the right side of his head would not fall off;
he approached his desk with the gait of a man underwater, poured out a shot of
General Issue vodka, and drank it. It turned him inside out: it extraverted him: it
normalized him. He felt better. He went out, and unable to stand the jouncing of his
motorbike, started to walk down the long, dusty main street of Centralville to HQ.

Passing the Luau, he thought with greed of another vodka; but Captain Davidson was
just going in the door, and Lyubov went on.

The people from the Shackleton were already in the conference room.

Commander Yung, whom he had met before, had brought some new faces down from
orbit this time. They were not in Navy uniform; after a moment Lyubov recognized
them, with a slight shock, as non-Terran humans. He sought an introduction at once.

One, Mr. Or, was a Hairy Cetian, dark gray, stocky, and dour; the other, Mr.
Lepennon, was tall, white, and comely: a Hainishman. They greeted Lyubov with
interest, and Lepennon said, “I’ve just been reading your report on the conscious
control of paradoxical sleep among the Athsheans, Dr. Lyubov,” which was pleasant,
and it was pleasant also to be called by his own, earned title of doctor. Their
conversation indicated that they had spent some years on Earth, and that they might
be hilfers, or something like it; but the Commander, introducing them, had not
mentioned their status or position.

The room was filling up. Gosse, the colony ecologist, came in; so did all the high
brass; so did Captain Susun, head of Planet Development—logging operations—
whose captaincy like Lyubov’s was an invention necessary to the peace of the
military mind. Captain Davidson came in alone, straight-backed and handsome, his
lean, rugged face calm and rather stern. Guards stood at all the doors. The Army
necks were all stiff as crowbars. The conference was plainly an Investigation. Whose
fault? My fault, Lyubov thought despairingly; but out of his despair he looked across
the table at Captain Don Davidson with detestation and contempt.

Commander Yung had a very quiet voice. “As you know, gentlemen, my ship
stopped here at World 41 to drop you off a new load of colonists, and nothing more;
Shackleton’s mission is to World 88, Prestno, one of the Hainish Group. However,
this attack on your outpost camp, since it chanced to occur during our week here,
can’t be simply ignored; particularly in the light of certain developments which you
would have been informed of a little later, in the normal course of events. The fact is
that the status of World 41 as an Earth Colony is now subject to revision, and the
massacre at your camp may precipitate the Administration’s decisions on it. Certainly
the decisions we can make must be made quickly, for I can’t keep my ship here long.

Now first, we wish to make sure that the relevant facts are all in the possession of
those present. Captain Davidson’s report on the events at Smith Camp was taped and
heard by all of us on ship; by all of you here also? Good. Now if there are questions
any of you wish to ask Captain Davidson, go ahead. I have one myself. You returned
to the site of the camp the following day, Captain Davidson, in a large hopper with
eight soldiers; had you the permission of a senior officer here at Central for that
flight?”

Davidson stood up. “I did, sir.”

“Were you authorized to land and to set fires in the forest near the campsite?”

“No, sir.”

“You did, however, set fires?”

“I did, sir. I was trying to smoke out the creechies that killed my men.”

“Very well. Mr. Lepennon?”

The tall Hainishman cleared his throat. “Captain Davidson,” he said, “do you
think that the people under your command at Smith Camp were mostly content?”

“Yes, I do.”

Davidson’s manner was firm and forthright; he seemed indifferent to the fact that
he was in trouble. Of course these Navy officers and foreigners had no authority over
him; it was to his own Colonel that he must answer for losing two hundred men and
making unauthorized reprisals. But his Colonel was right there, listening.

“They were well fed, well housed, not overworked, then, as well as can be
managed in a frontier camp?”

“Yes.”

“Was the discipline maintained very harsh?”

“No, it was not.”

“What, then, do you think motivated the revolt?”

“I don’t understand.”

“If none of them were discontented, why did some of them massacre the rest and
destroy the camp?”

There was a worried silence.

“May I put in a word,” Lyubov said. “It was the native hilfs, the Athsheans
employed in the camp, who joined with an attack by the forest people against the
Terran humans. In his report Captain Davidson referred to the Athsheans as
‘creechies.’ ”

Lepennon looked embarrassed and anxious.

“Thank you, Dr. Lyubov. I
misunderstood entirely. Actually I took the word ‘creechie’ to stand for a Terran caste
that did rather menial work in the logging camps. Believing, as we all did, that the
Athsheans were intraspecies non-aggressive, I never thought they might be the group
meant. In fact I didn’t realize that they cooperated with you in your camps.—
However, I am more at a loss than ever to understand what provoked the attack and
mutiny.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“When he said the people under his command were content, did the Captain
include native people?” said the Cetian, Or, in a dry mumble. The Hainishman picked
it up at once, and asked Davidson, in his concerned, courteous voice, “Were the
Athsheans living at the camp content, do you think?”

“So far as I know.”

“There was nothing unusual in their position there, or the work they had to do?”

Lyubov felt the heightening of tension, one turn of the screw, in Colonel Dongh
and his staff, and also in the starship commander. Davidson remained calm and easy.

“Nothing unusual.”

Lyubov knew now that only his scientific studies had been sent up to the
Shackleton; his protests, even his annual assessments of
“Native Adjustment to
Colonial Presence” required by the Administration, had been kept in some desk
drawer deep in HQ. These two N.-T.H.’s knew nothing about the exploitation of the
Athsheans. Commander Yung did, of course; he had been down before today and had
probably seen the creechie-pens. In any case a Navy commander on Colony runs
wouldn’t have much to learn about Terran-hilf relations. Whether or not he approved
of how the Colonial Administration ran its business, not much would come as a shock
to him. But a Cetian and a Hainishman, how much would they know about Terran
colonies, unless chance brought them to one on the way to somewhere else?

Lepennon and Or had not intended to come on-planet here at all. Or possibly they had
not been intended to come on-planet, but, hearing of trouble, had insisted. Why had
the commander brought them down: his will, or theirs? Whoever they were, they had
about them a hint of authority, a whiff of the dry, intoxicating odor of power.

Lyubov’s headache had gone, he felt alert and excited, his face was rather hot.

“Captain Davidson,” he said,

“I have a couple of questions concerning your
confrontation with the four natives day before yesterday. You’re certain that one of
them was Sam, or Selver Thele?”

“I believe so.”

“You’re aware that he has a personal grudge against you.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t? Since his wife died in your quarters immediately subsequent to
sexual intercourse with you, he holds you responsible for her death; you didn’t know
that? He attacked you once before, here in Centralville; you had forgotten that? Well,
the point is, that Selver’s personal hatred for Captain Davidson may serve as a partial
explanation or motivation for this unprecedented assault. The Athsheans aren’t
incapable of personal violence, that’s never been asserted in any of my studies of
them. Adolescents who haven’t mastered controlled dreaming or competitive singing
do a lot of wrestling and fist-fighting, not all of it good-tempered. But Selver is an
adult and an adept; and his first, personal attack on Captain Davidson, which I
happened to witness part of, was pretty certainly an attempt to kill. As was the
Captain’s retaliation, incidentally. At the time, I thought that attack an isolated
psychotic incident, resulting from grief and stress, not likely to be repeated. I was
wrong.—Captain, when the four Athsheans jumped you from ambush, as you
describe in your report, did you end up prone on the ground?”

“Yes.”

“In what position?”

Davidson’s calm face tensed and stiffened, and Lyubov felt a pang of
compunction. He wanted to corner Davidson in his lies, to force him into speaking
truth once, but not to humiliate him before others. Accusations of rape and murder
supported Davidson’s image of himself as the totally virile man, but now that image
was endangered: Lyubov had called up a picture of him, the soldier, the fighter, the
cool tough man, being knocked down by enemies the size of six-year-olds…What did
it cost Davidson, then, to recall that moment when he had lain looking up at the little
green men, for once, not down at them?

“I was on my back.”

“Was your head thrown back, or turned aside?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m trying to establish a fact here, Captain, one that might help explain why
Selver didn’t kill you, although he had a grudge against you and had helped kill two
hundred men a few hours earlier. I wondered if you might by chance have been in one
of the positions which, when assumed by an Athshean, prevent his opponent from
further physical aggression.”

“I don’t know.”

Lyubov glanced round the conference table; all the faces showed curiosity and
some tension. “These aggression-halting gestures and positions may have some
innate basis, may rise from a surviving trigger-response, but they are socially
developed and expanded, and of course learned. The strongest and completest of
them is a prone position, on the back, eyes shut, head turned so the throat is fully
exposed. I think an Athshean of the local cultures might find it impossible to hurt an
enemy who took that position. He would have to do something else to release his
anger or aggressive drive. When they had all got you down, Captain, did Selver by
any chance sing?”

“Did he what?”

“Sing.”

“I don’t know.”

Block. No go. Lyubov was about to shrug and give it up when the Cetian said,
“Why, Mr. Lyubov?” The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian
temperament was curiosity, inopportune and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died
eagerly, curious as to what came next.

“You see,” Lyubov said, “the Athsheans use a kind of ritualised singing to replace
physical combat. Again it’s a universal social phenomenon that might have a
physiological foundation, though it’s very hard to establish anything as ‘innate’ in
human beings. However the higher primates here all go in for vocal competing
between two males, a lot of howling and whistling; the dominant male may finally
give the other a cuff, but usually they just spend an hour or so trying to outbellow
each other. The Athsheans themselves see the similarity to their singing-matches,
which are also only between males; but as they observe, theirs are not only
aggression-releases, but an art-form. The better artist wins. I wondered if Selver sang
over Captain Davidson, and if so, whether he did because he could not kill, or
because he preferred the bloodless victory. These questions have suddenly become
rather urgent.”

“Dr. Lyubov,” said Lepennon, “how effective are these aggression-channeling
devices? Are they universal?”

“Among adults, yes. So my informants state, and all my observation supported
them, until day before yesterday. Rape, violent assault, and murder virtually don’t
exist among them. There are accidents, of course. And there are psychotics. Not
many of the latter.”

“What do they do with dangerous psychotics?”

“Isolate them. Literally. On small islands.”

“The Athsheans are carnivorous, they hunt animals?”

“Yes, meat is a staple.”

“Wonderful,” Lepennon said, and his white skin paled further with pure
excitement. “A human society with an effective war-barrier! What’s the cost, Dr.
Lyubov?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Lepennon. Perhaps change. They’re a static, stable, uniform
society. They have no history. Perfectly integrated, and wholly unprogressive. You
might say that like the forest they live in, they’ve attained a climax state. But I don’t
mean to imply that they’re incapable of adaptation.”

“Gentlemen, this is very interesting but in a somewhat specialist frame of
reference, and it may be somewhat out of the context which we’re attempting to
clarify here—”

“No, excuse me, Colonel Dongh, this may be the point. Yes, Dr. Lyubov?”

“Well, I wonder if they’re not proving their adaptability, now. By adapting their
behavior to us. To the Earth Colony. For four years they’ve behaved to us as they do
to one another. Despite the physical differences, they recognized us as members of
their species, as men. However, we have not responded as members of their species
should respond. We have ignored the responses, the rights and obligations of non-
violence. We have killed, raped, dispersed, and enslaved the native humans,
destroyed their communities, and cut down their forests. It wouldn’t be surprising if
they’d decided that we are not human.”

“And therefore can be killed, like animals, yes yes,” said the Cetian, enjoying
logic; but Lepennon’s face now was stiff as white stone. “Enslaved?” he said.

“Captain Lyubov is expressing his personal opinions and theories,” said Colonel
Dongh, “which I should state I consider possibly to be erroneous, and he and I have
discussed this type of thing previously, although the present context is unsuitable. We
do not employ slaves, sir. Some of the natives serve a useful role in our community.

The Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps is a part of all but the temporary camps
here. We have very limited personnel to accomplish our tasks here and we need
workers and use all we can get, but on any kind of basis that could be called a slavery
basis, certainly not.”

Lepennon was about to speak, but deferred to the Cetian, who said only, “How
many of each race?”

Gosse replied:

“2641 Terrans, now. Lyubov and I estimate the native hilf
population very roughly at 3 million.”

“You should have considered these statistics, gentlemen, before you altered the
native traditions!” said Or, with a disagreeable but perfectly genuine laugh.

“We are adequately armed and equipped to resist any type of aggression these
natives could offer,” said the Colonel. “However there was a general consensus by
both the first Exploratory Missions and our own research staff of specialists here
headed by Captain Lyubov, giving us to understand that the New Tahitians are a
primitive, harmless, peace-loving species. Now this information was obviously
erroneous—”

Or interrupted the Colonel. “Obviously! You consider the human species to be
primitive, harmless, and peace-loving, Colonel? No. But you knew that the hilfs of
this planet are human? As human as you or I or Lepennon—since we all came from
the same, original, Hainish stock?”

“That is the scientific theory, I am aware—”

“Colonel, it is the historic fact.”

“I am not forced to accept it as a fact,” the old Colonel said, getting hot, “and I
don’t like opinions stuffed into my own mouth. The fact is that these creechies are a
meter tall, they’re covered with green fur, they don’t sleep, and they’re not human
beings in my frame of reference!”

“Captain Davidson,” said the Cetian, “do you consider the native hilfs human, or
not?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you had sexual intercourse with one—this Selver’s wife. Would you have
sexual intercourse with a female animal? What about the rest of you?” He looked
about at the purple colonel, the glowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing
specialists. Contempt came into his face. “You have not thought things through,” he
said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.

The Commander of the Shackleton at last salvaged words from the gulf of
embarrassed silence. “Well, gentlemen, the tragedy at Smith Camp clearly is involved
with the entire colony-native relationship, and is not by any means an insignificant or
isolated episode. That’s what we had to establish. And this being the case, we can
make a certain contribution toward easing your problems here. The main purpose of
our journey was not to drop off a couple of hundred girls here, though I know you’ve
been waiting for ’em, but to get to Prestno, which has been having some difficulties,
and give the government there an ansible. That is, an ICD transmitter.”

“What?” said Sereng, an engineer. Stares became fixed, all round the table.

“The one we have aboard is an early model, and it cost a planetary annual
revenue, roughly. That, of course, was twenty-seven years ago planetary time, when
we left Earth. Nowadays they’re making them relatively cheaply; they’re SI on Navy
ships; and in the normal course of things a robo or manned ship would be coming out
here to give your colony one. As a matter of fact it’s a manned Administration ship,
and is on the way, due here in 9.4 E-years if I recall the figure.”

“How do you know that?” somebody said, setting it up for Commander Yung,
who replied smiling, “By the ansible: the one we have aboard. Mr. Or, your people
invented the device, perhaps you’d explain it to those here who are unfamiliar with
the terms?”

The Cetian did not unbend. “I shall not attempt to explain the principles of ansible
operation to those present,” he said. “Its effect can be stated simply: the instantaneous
transmission of a message over any distance. One element must be on a large-mass
body, the other can be anywhere in the cosmos. Since arrival in orbit the Shackleton
has been in daily communication with Terra, now twenty-seven lightyears distant.

The message does not take 54 years for delivery and response, as it does on an
electromagnetic device. It takes no time. There is no more time-gap between worlds.”

“As soon as we came out of NAFAL time-dilatation into planetary space-time,
here, we rang up home, as you might say,” the soft-voice Commander went on. “And
were told what had happened during the twenty-seven years we were traveling. The
time-gap for bodies remains, but the information lag does not. As you can see, this is
as important to us as an interstellar species, as speech itself was to us earlier in our
evolution. It’ll have the same effect: to make a society possible.”

“Mr. Or and I left Earth, twenty-seven years ago, as Legates for our respective
governments, Tau II and Hain,” said Lepennon. His voice was still gentle and civil,
but the warmth had gone out of it. “When we left, people were talking about the
possibility of forming some kind of league among the civilized worlds, now that
communication was possible. The League of Worlds now exists. It has existed for
eighteen years. Mr. Or and I are now Emissaries of the Council of the League, and so
have certain powers and responsibilities we did not have when we left Earth.”

The three of them from the ship kept saying these things: an instantaneous
communicator exists, an interstellar supergovernment exists…Believe it or not. They
were in league, and lying. This thought went through Lyubov’s mind; he considered
it, decided it was a reasonable but unwarranted suspicion, a defense-mechanism, and
discarded it. Some of the military staff, however, trained to compartmentalize their
thinking, specialists in self-defense, would accept it as unhesitatingly as he discarded
it. They must believe that anyone claiming a sudden new authority was a liar or
conspirator. They were no more constrained than Lyubov, who had been trained to
keep his mind open whether he wanted to or not.

“Are we to take all—all this simply on your word, sir?” said Colonel Dongh, with
dignity and some pathos; for he, too muddleheaded to compartmentalize neatly, knew
that he shouldn’t believe Lepennon and Or and Yung, but did believe them, and was
frightened.

“No,” said the Cetian. “That’s done with. A colony like this had to believe what
passing ships and outdated radio-messages told them. Now you don’t. You can verify.
We are going to give you the ansible destined for Prestno. We have League authority
to do so. Received, of course, by ansible. Your colony here is in a bad way. Worse
than I thought from your reports. Your reports are very incomplete; censorship or
stupidity have been at work. Now, however, you’ll have the ansible, and can talk with
your Terran Administration; you can ask for orders, so you’ll know how to proceed.
Given the profound changes that have been occurring in the organization of the
Terran Government since we left there, I should recommend that you do so at once.
There is no longer any excuse for acting on outdated orders; for ignorance; for
irresponsible autonomy.”

Sour a Cetian and, like milk, he stayed sour. Mr. Or was being overbearing, and
Commander Yung should shut him up. But could he? How did an “Emissary of the
Council of the League of Worlds” rank? Who’s in charge here, thought Lyubov, and
he too felt a qualm of fear. His headache had returned as a sense of constriction, a sort
of tight headband over the temples.

He looked across the table at Lepennon’s white, long-fingered hands, lying left
over right, quiet, on the bare polished wood of the table. The white skin was a defect
to Lyubov’s Earth-formed aesthetic taste, but the serenity and strength of those hands
pleased him very much. To the Hainish, he thought, civilization came naturally. They
had been at it so long. They lived the social-intellectual life with the grace of a cat
hunting in a garden, the certainty of a swallow following summer over the sea. They
were experts. They never had to pose, to fake. They were what they were. Nobody
seemed to fit the human skin so well. Except, perhaps, the little green men? The
deviant, dwarfed, over-adapted, stagnated creechies, who were as absolutely, as
honestly, as serenely what they were…

An officer, Benton, was asking Lepennon if he and Or were on this planet as
observers for the (he hesitated) League of Worlds, or if they claimed any authority
to…Lepennon took him up politely: “We are observers here, not empowered to
command, only to report. You are still answerable only to your own government on
Earth.”

Colonel Dongh said with relief, “Then nothing has essentially changed—”

“You forget the ansible,” Or interrupted.

“I’ll instruct you in its operation,
Colonel, as soon as this discussion is over. You can then consult with your Colonial
Administration.”

“Since your problem here is rather urgent, and since Earth is now a League
member and may have changed the Colonial Code somewhat during recent years, Mr.
Or’s advice is both proper and timely. We should be very grateful to Mr. Or and Mr.
Lepennon for their decision to give this Terran colony the ansible destined for
Prestno. It was their decision; I can only applaud it. Now, one more decision remains
to be made, and this one I have to make, using your judgment as my guide. If you feel
the colony is in imminent peril of further and more massive attacks from the natives,
I can keep my ship here for a week or two as a defense arsenal; I can also evacuate
the women. No children yet, right?”

“No, sir,” said Gosse. “482 women, now.”

“Well, I have space for 380 passengers; we might crowd a hundred more in; the
extra mass would add a year or so to the trip home, but it could be done.
Unfortunately that’s all I can do. We must proceed to Prestno; your nearest neighbor,
as you know, 1.8 lightyears distant. We’ll stop here on the way home to Terra, but
that’s going to be three and a half more E-years at least. Can you stick it out?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, and others echoed him. “We’ve had warning now and we
won’t be caught napping again.”

“Equally,” said the Cetian, “can the native inhabitants stick it out for three and a
half Earth-years more?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel. “No,” said Lyubov. He had been watching Davidson’s
face, and a kind of panic had taken hold of him.

“Colonel?” said Lepennon, politely.

“We’ve been here four years now and the natives are flourishing. There’s room
enough and to spare for all of us, as you can see the planet’s heavily underpopulated
and the Administration wouldn’t have cleared it for colonization purposes if that
hadn’t been as it is. As for if this entered anyone’s head, they won’t catch us off guard
again, we were erroneously briefed concerning the nature of these natives, but we’re
fully armed and able to defend ourselves, but we aren’t planning any reprisals. That is
expressly forbidden in the Colonial Code, though I don’t know what new rules this
new government may have added on, but we’ll just stick to our own as we have been
doing and they definitely negative mass reprisals or genocide. We won’t be sending
any messages for help out, after all a colony twenty-seven lightyears from home has
come out expecting to be on its own and to in fact be completely self-sufficient, and I
don’t see that the ICD really changes that, due to ship and men and material still have
to travel at near lightspeed. We’ll just keep on shipping the lumber home, and look
out for ourselves. The women are in no danger.”

“Mr. Lyubov?” said Lepennon.

“We’ve been here four years. I don’t know if the native human culture will
survive four more. As for the total land ecology, I think Gosse will back me if I say
that we’ve irrecoverably wrecked the native life-systems on one large island, have
done great damage on this subcontinent Sornol, and if we go on logging at the present
rate, may reduce the major habitable lands to desert within ten years. This isn’t the
fault of the colony’s HQ or Forestry Bureau; they’ve simply been following a
Development Plan drawn up on Earth without sufficient knowledge of the planet to
be exploited, its life-systems, or its native human inhabitants.”

“Mr. Gosse?” said the polite voice.

“Well, Raj, you’re stretching things a bit. There’s no denying that Dump Island,
which was overlogged in direct contravention to my recommendations, is a dead loss.
If more than a certain percentage of the forest is cut over a certain area, then the
fibreweed doesn’t reseed, you see, gentlemen, and the fibreweed root-system is the
main soil-binder on clear land; without it the soil goes dusty and drifts off very fast
under wind-erosion and the heavy rainfall. But I can’t agree that our basic directives
are at fault, so long as they’re scrupulously followed. They were based on careful
study of the planet. We’ve succeeded, here on Central, by following the Plan: erosion
is minimal, and the cleared soil is highly arable. To log off a forest doesn’t, after all,
mean to make a desert—except perhaps from the point of view of a squirrel. We can’t
forecast precisely how the native forest life-systems will adapt to a new woodland-
prairie-plowland ambiance foreseen in the Development Plan, but we know the
chances are good for a large percentage of adaptation and survival.”

“That’s what the Bureau of Land Management said about Alaska during the First
Famine,” said Lyubov. His throat had tightened so that his voice came out high and
husky. He had counted on Gosse for support. “How many Sitka spruce have you seen
in your lifetime, Gosse? Or snowy owl? or wolf? or Eskimo? The survival percentage
of native Alaskan species in habitat, after 15 years of the Development Program, was
.3%. It’s now zero.—A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its
fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest. I
submit, Commander Yung, that though the colony may not be in imminent danger,
the planet is—”

“Captain Lyubov,” said the old Colonel, “such submissions are not properly
submitted by staff specialist officers to officers of other branches of the service but
should rest on the judgment of the senior officers of the Colony, and I cannot tolerate
any further such attempts as this to give advice without previous clearance.”

Caught off guard by his own outburst, Lyubov apologized and tried to look calm.

If only he didn’t lose his temper, if his voice didn’t go weak and husky, if he had
poise…

The Colonel went on. “It appears to us that you made some serious erroneous
judgments concerning the peacefulness and non-aggressiveness of the natives here,
and because we counted on this specialist description of them as non-aggressive is
why we left ourselves open to this terrible tragedy at Smith Camp, Captain Lyubov.
So I think we have to wait until some other specialists in hilfs have had time to study
them, because evidently your theories were basically erroneous to some extent.”

Lyubov sat and took it. Let the men from the ship see them all passing the blame
around like a hot brick: all the better. The more dissension they showed, the likelier
were these Emissaries to have them checked and watched over. And he was to blame;
he had been wrong. To hell with my self-respect so long as the forest people get a
chance, Lyubov thought, and so strong a sense of his own humiliation and self-
sacrifice came over him that tears rose to his eyes.

He was aware that Davidson was watching him.

He sat up stiff, the blood hot in his face, his temples drumming. He would not be
sneered at by that bastard Davidson. Couldn’t Or and Lepennon see what kind of man
Davidson was, and how much power he had here, while Lyubov’s powers, called
“advisory,” were simply derisory? If the colonists were left to go on with no check on
them but a super-radio, the Smith Camp massacre would almost certainly become the
excuse for systematic aggression against the natives. Bacteriological extermination,
most likely. The Shackleton would come back in three and a half or four years to
“New Tahiti,” and find a thriving Terran colony, and no more Creechie Problem.

None at all. Pity about the plague, we took all precautions required by the Code, but it
must have been some kind of mutation, they had no natural resistance, but we did
manage to save a group of them by transporting them to the New Falkland Isles in the
southern hemisphere and they’re doing fine there, all sixty-two of them…

The conference did not last much longer. When it ended he stood up and leaned
across the table to Lepennon. “You must tell the League to do something to save the
forests, the forest people,” he said almost inaudibly, his throat constricted, “you must,
please, you must.”

The Hainishman met his eyes; his gaze was reserved, kindly, and deep as a well.

He said nothing.

Chapter Four

IT was unbelievable. They’d all gone insane. This damned alien world had sent them
all right round the bend, into byebye dreamland, along with the creechies. He still
wouldn’t believe what he’d seen at that ‘conference’ and the briefing after it, if he
saw it all over again on film. A Starfleet ship’s commander bootlicking two
humanoids. Engineers and techs cooing and ooing over a fancy radio presented to
them by a Hairy Cetian with a lot of sneering and boasting, as if ICD’s hadn’t been
predicted by Terran science years ago! The humanoids had stolen the idea,
implemented it, and called it an ‘ansible’ so nobody would realize it was just an ICD.

But the worst part of it had been the conference, with that psycho Lyubov raving and
crying, and Colonel Dongh letting him do it, letting him insult Davidson and HQ staff
and the whole Colony; and all the time the two aliens sitting and grinning, the little
gray ape and the big white fairy, sneering at humans.

It had been pretty bad. It hadn’t got any better since the Shackleton left. He didn’t
mind being sent down to New Java Camp under Major Muhamed. The Colonel had to
discipline him; old Ding Dong might actually be very happy about that fire-raid he’d
pulled in reprisal on Smith Island, but the raid had been a breach of discipline and he
had to reprimand Davidson. All right, rules of the game. But what wasn’t in the rules
was this stuff coming over that overgrown TV set they called the ansible—their new
little tin god at HQ.

Orders from the Bureau of Colonial Administration in Karachi: Restrict Terran-
Athshean contact to occasions arranged by Athsheans. In other words you couldn’t
go into a creechie warren and round up a work-force any more. Employment of
volunteer labor is not advised; employment of forced labor is forbidden. More of
same. How the hell were they supposed to get the work done? Did Earth want this
wood or didn’t it? They were still sending the robot cargo ships to New Tahiti,
weren’t they, four a year, each carrying about 30 million new-dollars worth of prime
lumber back to Mother Earth. Sure the Development people wanted those millions.

They were businessmen. These messages weren’t coming from them, any fool could
see that.

The colonial status of World 41—why didn’t they call it New Tahiti any more?—
is under consideration. Until decision is reached colonists should observe extreme
caution in all dealings with native inhabitants…The use of weapons of any kind
except small side-arms carried in self-defense is absolutely forbidden—just as on
Earth, except that there a man couldn’t even carry side-arms any more. But what the
hell was the use coming twenty-seven lightyears to a frontier world and then get told
no guns, no firejelly, no bugbombs, no, no, just sit like nice little boys and let the
creechies come spit in your faces and sing songs at you and then stick a knife in your
guts and burn down your camp, but don’t you hurt the cute little green fellers, no sir!

A policy of avoidance is strongly advised; a policy of aggression or retaliation is
strictly forbidden.

That was the gist of all the messages actually, and any fool could tell that that
wasn’t the Colonial Administration talking. They couldn’t have changed that much in
thirty years. They were practical, realistic men who knew what life was like on
frontier planets. It was clear, to anybody who hadn’t gone spla from geoshock, that
the ‘ansible’ messages were phonies. They might be planted right in the machine, a
whole set of answers to high-probability questions, computer run. The engineers said
they could have spotted that; maybe so. In that case the thing did communicate
instantaneously with another world. But that world wasn’t Earth. Not by a long long
shot! There weren’t any men typing the answers onto the other end of that little trick:
they were aliens, humanoids. Probably Cetians, for the machine was Cetian-made,
and they were a smart bunch of devils. They were the kind that might make a real bid
for interstellar supremacy. The Hainish would be in the conspiracy with them, of
course; all that bleeding-heart stuff in the so-called directives had a Hainish sound to
it. What the long-term objective of the aliens was, was hard to guess from here; it
probably involved weakening the Terran Government by tying it up in this ‘league of
worlds’ business, until the aliens were strong enough to make an armed takeover. But
their plan for New Tahiti was easy to see. They’d let the creechies wipe out the
humans for them. Just tie the humans’ hands with a lot of fake ‘ansible’ directives and
let the slaughter begin. Humanoids help humanoids: rats help rats.

And Colonel Dongh had swallowed it. He intended to obey orders. He had
actually said that to Davidson. “I intend to obey my orders from Terra-HQ, and by
God, Don, you’ll obey my orders the same way, and in New Java you’ll obey Major
Muhamed’s orders there.” He was stupid, old Ding Dong, but he liked Davidson, and
Davidson liked him. If it meant betraying the human race to an alien conspiracy then
he couldn’t obey his orders, but he still felt sorry for the old soldier. A fool, but a
loyal and brave one. Not a born traitor like that whining, tattling prig Lyubov. If there
was one man he hoped the creechies did get, it was big-dome Raj Lyubov, the alien-
lover.

Some men, especially the asiatiforms and hindi types, are actually born traitors.

Not all, but some. Certain other men are born saviors. It just happened to be the way
they were made, like being of euraf descent, or like having a good physique; it wasn’t
anything he claimed credit for. If he could save the men and women of New Tahiti,
he would; if he couldn’t, he’d make a damn good try; and that was all there was to it,
actually.

The women, now, that rankled. They’d pulled out the 10 Collies who’d been in
New Java and none of the new ones were being sent out from Centralville. “Not safe
yet,” HQ bleated. Pretty rough on the three outpost camps. What did they expect the
outposters to do when it was hands off the she-creechies, and all the she-humans were
for the lucky bastards at Central? It was going to cause terrific resentment. But it
couldn’t last long, the whole situation was too crazy to be stable. If they didn’t start
easing back to normal now that Shackleton was gone, then Captain D. Davidson
would just have to do a little extra work to get things headed back toward normalcy.

The morning of the day he left Central, they had let loose the whole creechie
work-force. Made a big noble speech in pidgin, opened the compound gates, and let
out every single tame creechie, carriers, diggers, cooks, dustmen, houseboys, maids,
the lot. Not one had stayed. Some of them had been with their masters ever since the
start of the colony, four E-years ago. But they had no loyalty. A dog, a chimp would
have hung around. These things weren’t even that highly developed, they were just
about like snakes or rats, just smart enough to turn around and bite you as soon as
you let ’em out of the cage. Ding Dong was spla, letting all those creechies loose
right in the vicinity. Dumping them on Dump Island and letting them starve would
have been actually the best final solution. But Dongh was still panicked by that pair
of humanoids and their talky-box. So if the wild creechies on Central were planning
to imitate the Smith Camp atrocity, they now had lots of real handy new recruits, who
knew the layout of the whole town, the routines, where the arsenal was, where guards
were posted, and the rest. If Centralville got burned down, HQ could thank
themselves. It would be what they deserved, actually. For letting traitors dupe them,
for listening to humanoids and ignoring the advice of men who really knew what the
creechies were like.

None of those guys at HQ had come back to camp and found ashes and wreckage
and burned bodies, like he had. And Ok’s body, out where they’d slaughtered the
logging crew, it had had an arrow sticking out of each eye like some sort of weird
insect with antennae sticking out feeling the air, Christ, he kept seeing that.

One thing anyhow, whatever the phony ‘directives’ said, the boys at Central
wouldn’t be stuck with trying to use ‘small side-arms’ for self-defense. They had fire
throwers and machine guns; the 16 little hoppers had machine guns and were useful
for dropping firejelly cans from; the five big hoppers had full armament. But they
wouldn’t need the big stuff. Just take up a hopper over one of the deforested areas
and catch a mess of creechies there, with their damned bows and arrows, and start
dropping firejelly cans and watch them run around and burn. It would be all right. It
made his belly churn a little to imagine it, just like when he thought about making a
woman, or whenever he remembered about when that Sam creechie had attacked him
and he had smashed in his whole face with four blows one right after the other. It was
eidetic memory plus a more vivid imagination than most men had, no credit due, just
happened to be the way he was made.

The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had
a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old
books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the
creechies weren’t actually men.

New Java was the southernmost of the five big lands, just north of the equator,
and so was hotter than Central or Smith which were just about perfect climate-wise.

Hotter and a lot wetter. It rained all the time in the wet seasons anywhere on New
Tahiti, but in the northern lands it was a kind of quiet fine rain that went on and on
and never really got you wet or cold. Down here it came in buckets, and there was a
monsoon-type storm that you couldn’t even walk in, let alone work in. Only a solid
roof kept the rain off you, or else the forest. The damn forest was so thick it kept out
the storms. You’d get wet from all the dripping off the leaves, of course, but if you
were really inside the forest during one of those monsoons you’d hardly notice the
wind was blowing; then you came out in the open and wham! got knocked off your
feet by the wind and slobbered all over with the red liquid mud that the rain turned
the cleared ground into, and you couldn’t duck back into the forest quick enough; and
inside the forest it was dark, and hot, and easy to get lost.

Then the C.O., Major Muhamed, was a sticky bastard. Everything at N. J. was
done by the book: the logging all in kilo-strips, the fibreweed crap planted in the
logged strips, leave to Central granted in strictly non-preferential rotation,
hallucinogens rationed and their use on duty punished, and so on and so on. However,
one good thing about Muhamed was he wasn’t always radioing Central. New Java
was his camp, and he ran it his way. He didn’t like orders from HQ. He obeyed them
all right, he’d let the creechies go, and locked up all the guns except little popgun
pistols, as soon as the orders came. But he didn’t go looking for orders, or for advice.

Not from Central or anybody else. He was a self-righteous type: knew he was right.

That was his big fault.

When he was on Dongh’s staff at HQ Davidson had had occasion sometimes to
see the officers’ records. His unusual memory held on to such things, and he could
recall for instance that Muhamed’s IQ was 107. Whereas his own happened to be 118.

There was a difference of 11 points; but of course he couldn’t say that to old Moo,
and Moo couldn’t see it, and so there was no way to get him to listen. He thought he
knew better than Davidson, and that was that.

They were all a bit sticky at first, actually. None of these men at N. J. knew
anything about the Smith Camp atrocity, except that the camp C.O. had left for
Central an hour before it happened, and so was the only human that escaped alive.

Put like that, it did sound bad. You could see why at first they looked at him like a
kind of Jonah, or worse, a kind of Judas even. But when they got to know him they’d
know better. They’d begin to see that, far from being a deserter or traitor, he was
dedicated to preventing the colony of New Tahiti from betrayal. And they’d realize
that getting rid of the creechies was going to be the only way to make this world safe
for the Terran way of life.

It wasn’t too hard to start getting that message across to the loggers. They’d never
liked the little green rats, having to drive them to work all day and guard them all
night; but now they began to understand that the creechies were not only repulsive
but dangerous. When Davidson told them what he’d found at Smith; when he
explained how the two humanoids on the Fleet ship had brainwashed HQ; when he
showed them that wiping out the Terrans on New Tahiti was just a small part of the
whole alien conspiracy against Earth; when he reminded them of the cold hard
figures, twenty-five hundred humans to three million creechies—then they began to
really get behind him.

Even the Ecological Control Officer here was with him. Not like poor old Kees,
mad because men shot red deer and then getting shot in the guts himself by the
sneaking creechies. This fellow, Atranda, was a creechie-hater. Actually he was kind
of spla about them, he had geoshock or something; he was so afraid the creechies
were going to attack the camp that he acted like some woman afraid of getting raped.

But it was useful to have the local spesh on his side anyhow.

No use trying to line up the C.O.; a good judge of men, Davidson had seen it was
no use almost at once. Muhamed was rigid-minded. Also he had a prejudice against
Davidson which he wouldn’t drop; it had something to do with the Smith Camp
affair. He as much as told Davidson he didn’t consider him a trustworthy officer.

He was a self-righteous bastard, but his running N.J. camp on such rigid lines was
an advantage. A tight organization, used to obeying orders, was easier to take over
than a loose one full of independent characters, and easier to keep together as a unit
for defensive and offensive military operations, once he was in command. He would
have to take command. Moo was a good logging-camp boss, but no soldier.

Davidson kept busy getting some of the best loggers and junior officers really
firmly with him. He didn’t hurry. When he had enough of them he could really trust,
a squad of ten lifted a few items from old Moo’s locked-up room in the Rec House
basement full of war toys, and then went off one Sunday into the woods to play.

Davidson had located the creechie town some weeks ago, and had saved up the
treat for his men. He could have done it singlehanded, but it was better this way. You
got the sense of comradeship, of a real bond among men. They just walked into the
place in broad open daylight, and coated all the creechies caught above-ground with
firejelly and burned them, then poured kerosene over the warren-roofs and roasted the
rest. Those that tried to get out got jellied; that was the artistic part, waiting at the rat-
holes for the little rats to come out, letting them think they’d made it, and then just
frying them from the feet up so they made torches. That green fur sizzled like crazy.

It actually wasn’t much more exciting than hunting real rats, which were about
the only wild animals left on Mother Earth, but there was more thrill to it; the
creechies were a lot bigger than rats, and you knew they could fight back, though this
time they didn’t. In fact some of them even lay down instead of running away, just
lay there on their backs with their eyes shut. It was sickening. The other fellows
thought so too, and one of them actually got sick and vomited after he’d burned up
one of the lying-down ones.

Hard up as the men were, they didn’t leave even one of the females alive to rape.

They had all agreed with Davidson beforehand that it was too damn near perversity.

Homosexuality was with other humans, it was normal. These things might be built
like human women but they weren’t human, and it was better to get your kicks from
killing them, and stay clean. That had made good sense to all of them, and they stuck
to it.

Every one of them kept his trap shut back at camp, no boasting even to their
buddies. They were sound men. Not a word of the expedition got to Muhamed’s ears.
So far as old Moo knew, all his men were good little boys just sawing up logs and
keeping away from creechies, yes sir; and he could go on believing that until D-Day
came.

For the creechies would attack. Somewhere. Here, or one of the camps on King
Island, or Central. Davidson knew that. He was the only officer in the entire colony
that did know it. No credit due, he just happened to know he was right. Nobody else
had believed him, except these men here whom he’d had time to convince. But the
others would all see, sooner or later, that he was right.

And he was right.

Chapter Five

IT had been a shock, meeting Selver face to face. As he flew back to Central from the
foothill village, Lyubov tried to decide why it had been a shock, to analyze out the
nerve that had jumped. For after all one isn’t usually terrified by a chance meeting
with a good friend.

It hadn’t been easy to get the headwoman to invite him. Tuntar had been his main
locus of study all summer; he had several excellent informants there and was on good
terms with the Lodge and with the headwoman, who had let him observe and
participate in the community freely. Wangling an actual invitation out of her, via
some of the ex-serfs still in the area, had taken a long time, but at last she had
complied, giving him, according to the new directives, a genuine ‘occasion arranged
by the Athsheans.’ His own conscience, rather than the Colonel, had insisted on this.
Dongh wanted him to go. He was worried about the Creechie Threat. He told Lyubov
to size them up, to ‘see how they’re reacting now that we’re leaving them strictly
alone.’ He hoped for reassurance. Lyubov couldn’t decide whether the report he’d be
turning in would reassure Colonel Dongh, or not.

For ten miles out of Central, the plain had been logged and the stumps had all
rotted away; it was now a great dull flat of fibreweed, hairy gray in the rain. Under
those hirsute leaves the seedling shrubs got their first growth, the sumacs, dwarf
aspens, and salviforms which, grown, would in turn protect the seedling trees. Left
alone, in this even, rainy climate, this area might reforest itself within thirty years and
reattain the full climax forest within a hundred. Left alone.

Suddenly the forest began again, in space not time: under the helicopter the
infinitely various green of leaves covered the slow swells and foldings of the hills of
North Sornol. Like most Terrans on Terra, Lyubov had never walked among wild
trees at all, never seen a wood larger than a city block. At first on Athshe he had felt
oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of
trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and
jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outward and upward
toward light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total
vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the
others he had kept to clearings and to the beach. But little by little he had begun to
like it. Gosse teased him, calling him Mr. Gibbon; in fact Lyubov looked rather like a
gibbon, with a round, dark face, long arms, and hair graying early; but gibbons were
extinct. Like it or not, as a hilfer he had to go into the forests to find the hilfs; and
now after four years of it he was completely at home under the trees, more so perhaps
than anywhere else.

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He had also come to like the Athsheans’ names for their own lands and places,
sonorous two-syllabled words: Sornol, Tuntar, Eshreth, Eshsen—that was now
Centralville—Endtor, Abtan, and above all Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the
World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one.

But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by
which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran
man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve
figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

He brought the hopper down in a small glade north of the town, and walked in
past the Women’s Lodge. The smell of an Athshean settlement hung pungent in the
air, woodsmoke, dead fish, aromatic herbs, alien sweat. The atmosphere of an
underground house, if a Terran could fit himself in at all, was a rare compound of
CO₂ and stinks. Lyubov had spent many intellectually stimulating hours doubled up
and suffocating in the reeking gloom of the Men’s Lodge in Tuntar. But it didn’t look
as if he would be invited in this time.

Of course the townsfolk knew of the Smith Camp massacre, now six weeks ago.

They would have known of it soon, for word got around fast among the islands,
though not so fast as to constitute a ‘mysterious power of telepathy’ as the loggers
liked to believe. The townsfolk also knew that the 1200 slaves at Centralville had
been freed soon after the Smith Camp massacre, and Lyubov agreed with the Colonel
that the natives might take the second event to be a result of the first. That gave what
Colonel Dongh would call
‘an erroneous impression,’ but it probably wasn’t
important. What was important was that the slaves had been freed. Wrongs done
could not be righted; but at least they were not still being done. They could start over:
the natives without that painful, unanswerable wonder as to why the ‘yumens’ treated
men like animals; and he without the burden of explanation and the gnawing of
irremediable guilt.

Knowing how they valued candor and direct speech concerning frightening or
troublous matters, he expected that people in Tuntar would talk about these things
with him, in triumph, or apology, or rejoicing, or puzzlement. No one did. No one
said much of anything to him.

He had come in late afternoon, which was like ‘arriving in a Terran city just after
dawn. Athsheans did sleep—the colonists’ opinion, as often, ignored observable fact
—but their physiological low was between noon and four p.m., whereas with Terrans
it is usually between two and five a.m.; and they had a double-peak cycle of high
temperature and high activity, coming in the two twilights, dawn and evening. Most
adults slept five or six hours in 24, in several catnaps; and adept men slept as little as
two hours in 24; so, if one discounted both their naps and their dreaming-states as
‘laziness,’ one might say they never slept. It was much easier to say that than to
understand what they actually did do.—At this point, in Tuntar, things were just
beginning to stir again after the late-day slump.

Lyubov noticed a good many strangers. They looked at him, but none
approached; they were mere presences passing on other paths in the dusk of the great
oaks. At last someone he knew came along his path, the headwoman’s cousin Sherrar,
an old woman of small importance and small understanding. She greeted him civilly,
but did not or would not respond to his inquiries about the headwoman and his two
best informants, Egath the Orchard-keeper and Tubab the Dreamer. Oh, the
headwoman was very busy, and who was Egath, did he mean Geban, and Tubab
might be here or perhaps he was there, or not. She stuck to Lyubov, and nobody else
spoke to him. He worked his way, accompanied by the hobbling, complaining, tiny,
green crone, across the groves and glades of Tuntar to the Men’s Lodge. “They’re
busy in there,” said Sherrar.

“Dreaming?”

“However should I know? Come along now, Lyubov, come see…” She knew he
always wanted to see things, but she couldn’t think what to show him to draw him
away. “Come see the fishing-nets,” she said feebly.

A girl passing by, one of the Young Hunters, looked up at him: a black look, a
stare of animosity such as he had never received from any Athshean, unless perhaps
from a little child frightened into scowling by his height and his hairless face. But this
girl was not frightened.

“All right,” he said to Sherrar, feeling that his only course was docility. If the
Athsheans had indeed developed—at last, and abruptly—the sense of group enmity,
then he must accept this, and simply try to show them that he remained a reliable,
unchanging friend.

But how could their way of feeling and thinking have changed so fast, after so
long? And why? At Smith Camp, provocation had been immediate and intolerable:
Davidson’s cruelty would drive even Athsheans to violence. But this town, Tuntar,
had never been attacked by the Terrans, had suffered no slave-raids, had not seen the
local forest logged or burned. He, Lyubov himself, had been there—the
anthropologist cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture he draws—but
not for over two months now. They had got the news from Smith, and there were
among them now refugees, ex-slaves, who had suffered at the Terrans’ hands and
would talk about it. But would news and hearsay change the hearers, change them
radically?—when their unaggressiveness ran so deep in them, right through their
culture and society and on down into their subconscious, their ‘dream time,’ and
perhaps into their very physiology? That an Athshean could be provoked, by
atrocious cruelty, to attempt murder, he knew: he had seen it happen—once. That a
disrupted community might be similarly provoked by similarly intolerable injuries, he
had to believe: it had happened at Smith Camp. But that talk and hearsay, no matter
how frightening and outrageous, could enrage a settled community of these people to
the point where they acted against their customs and reason, broke entirely out of
their whole style of living, this he couldn’t believe. It was psychologically
improbable. Some element was missing.

Old Tubab came out of the Lodge, just as Lyubov passed in front of it. Behind the
old man came Selver.

Selver crawled out of the tunnel-door, stood upright, blinked at the rain-grayed,
foliage-dimmed brightness of daylight. His dark eyes met Lyubov’s, looking up.

Neither spoke. Lyubov was badly frightened.

Flying home in the hopper, analyzing out the shocked nerve, he thought, why
fear? Why was I afraid of Selver? Unprovable intuition or mere false analogy?

Irrational in any case.

Nothing between Selver and Lyubov had changed. What Selver had done at Smith
Camp could be justified; even if it couldn’t be justified, it made no difference. The
friendship between them was too deep to be touched by moral doubt. They had
worked very hard together; they had taught each other, in rather more than the literal
sense, their languages. They had spoken without reserve. And Lyubov’s love for his
friend was deepened by that gratitude the savior feels toward the one whose life he
has been privileged to save.

Indeed he had scarcely realized until that moment how deep his liking and loyalty
to Selver were. Had his fear in fact been the personal fear that Selver might, having
learned racial hatred, reject him, despise his loyalty, and treat him not as ‘you,’ but as
‘one of them’?

After that long first gaze Selver came forward slowly and greeted Lyubov,
holding out his hands.

Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among
Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is
often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was
filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch. Caress as signal and
reassurance was as essential to them as it is to mother and child or to lover and lover;
but its significance was social, not only maternal and sexual. It was part of their
language, it was therefore patterned, codified, yet infinitely modifiable. “They’re
always pawing each other,” some of the colonists sneered, unable to see in these
touch-exchanges anything but their own eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself
exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every
sensual pleasure, every humane response: the victory of a blinded, furtive Cupid over
the great brooding mother of all the seas and stars, all the leaves of trees, all the
gestures of men, Venus Genetrix…

So Selver came forward with his hands held out, shook Lyubov’s hand Terran
fashion, and then took both his arms with a stroking motion just above the elbow. He
was not much more than half Lyubov’s height, which made all gestures difficult and
ungainly for both of them, but there was nothing uncertain or childlike in the touch of
his small, thin-boned, green-furred hand on Lyubov’s arms. It was a reassurance.

Lyubov was very glad to get it.

“Selver, what luck to meet you here. I want very much to talk with you—”

“I can’t now, Lyubov.”

He spoke gently, but when he spoke Lyubov’s hope of an unaltered friendship
vanished. Selver had changed. He was changed, radically: from the root.

“Can I come back,” Lyubov said urgently, “another day, and talk with you,
Selver? It is important to me—”

“I leave here today,” Selver said even more gently, but letting go Lyubov’s arms,
and also looking away. He thus put himself literally out of touch. Civility required
that Lyubov do the same, and let the conversation end. But then there would be no
one to talk to. Old Tubab had not even looked at him; the town had turned its back on
him. And this was Selver, who had been his friend.

“Selver, this killing at Kelme Deva, maybe you think that lies between us. But it
does not. Maybe it brings us closer together. And your people in the slave-pens,
they’ve all been set free, so that wrong no longer lies between us. And even if it does
—it always did—all the same I…I am the same man I was, Selver.”

At first the Athshean made no response. His strange face, the large deep-set eyes,
the strong features misshapen by scars and blurred by the short silken fur that
followed and yet obscured all contours, this face turned from Lyubov, shut, obstinate.

Then suddenly he looked round as if against his own intent. “Lyubov, you shouldn’t
have come here. You should leave Central two nights from now. I don’t know what
you are. It would be better if I had never known you.”

And with that he was off, a light walk like a long-legged cat, a green flicker
among the dark oaks of Tuntar, gone. Tubab followed slowly after him, still without a
glance at Lyubov. A fine rain fell without sound on the oak-leaves and on the narrow
pathways to the Lodge and the river. Only if you listened intently could you hear the
rain, too multitudinous a music for one mind to grasp, a single endless chord played
on the entire forest.

“Selver is a god,” said old Sherrar. “Come and see the fishing-nets now.”
Lyubov declined. It would be impolite and impolitic to stay; anyway he had no
heart to.

He tried to tell himself that Selver had not been rejecting him, Lyubov, but him as
a Terran. It made no difference. It never does.

He was always disagreeably surprised to find how vulnerable his feelings were,
how much it hurt him to be hurt. This sort of adolescent sensitivity was shameful, he
should have a tougher hide by now.

The little crone, her green fur all dusted and be-silvered with raindrops, sighed
with relief when he said goodbye. As he started the hopper he had to grin at the sight
of her, hop-hobbling off into the trees as fast as she could go, like a little toad that has
escaped a snake.

Quality is an important matter, but so is quantity: relative size. The normal adult
reaction to a very much smaller person may be arrogant, or protective, or patronizing,
or affectionate, or bullying, but whatever it is it’s liable to be better fitted to a child
than to an adult. Then, when the child-sized person was furry, a further response got
called upon, which Lyubov had labeled the Teddybear Reaction. Since the Athsheans
used caress so much, its manifestation was not inappropriate, but its motivation
remained suspect. And finally there was the inevitable Freak Reaction, the flinching
away from what is human but does not quite look so.

But quite outside of all that was the fact that the Athsheans, like Terrans, were
simply funny-looking at times. Some of them did look like little toads, owls,
caterpillars. Sherrar was not the first little old lady who had struck Lyubov as looking
funny from behind…

And that’s one trouble with the colony, he thought as he lifted the hopper and
Tuntar vanished beneath the oaks and the leafless orchards. We haven’t got any old
women. No old men either, except Dongh and he’s only about sixty. But old women
are different from everybody else, they say what they think. The Athsheans are
governed, in so far as they have government, by old women. Intellect to the men,
politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that’s their arrangement.

It has charm, and it works—for them. I wish the administration had sent out a couple
of grannies along with all those nubile fertile high-breasted young women. Now that
girl I had over the other night, she’s really very nice, and nice in bed, she has a kind
heart, but my God it’ll be forty years before she’ll say anything to a man…

But all the time, beneath his thoughts concerning old women and young ones, the
shock persisted, the intuition or recognition that would not let itself be recognized.

He must think this out before he reported to HQ.

Selver: What about Selver, then?

Selver was certainly a key figure to Lyubov. Why? Because he knew him well, or
because of some actual power in his personality, which Lyubov had never
consciously appreciated?

But he had appreciated it; he had picked Selver out very soon as an extraordinary
person. ‘Sam,’ he had been then, bodyservant for three officers sharing a prefab.

Lyubov remembered Benson boasting what a good creechie they’d got, they’d broke
him in right.

Many Athsheans, especially Dreamers from the Lodges, could not change their
polycyclic sleep-pattern to fit the Terran one. If they caught up with their normal
sleep at night, that prevented them from catching up with the REM or paradoxical
sleep, whose 120-minute cycle ruled their life both day and night, and could not be
fitted in to the Terran workday. Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide
awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor’s edge of reason but on the double
support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you
cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think. So many of the men
became groggy, confused, withdrawn, even catatonic. Woman, bewildered and
abased, behaved with the sullen listlessness of the newly enslaved. Male non-adepts
and some of the younger Dreamers did best; they adapted, working hard in the
logging camps or becoming clever servants. Sam had been one of these, an efficient,
characterless bodyservant, cook, laundry-boy, butler, back soaper, and scapegoat for
his three masters. He had learned how to be invisible. Lyubov borrowed him as an
ethnological informant, and had, by some affinity of mind and nature, won Sam’s
trust at once. He found Sam the ideal informant, trained in his people’s customs,
perceptive of their significances, and quick to translate them, to make them
intelligible to Lyubov, bridging the gap between two languages, two cultures, two
species of the genus Man.

For two years Lyubov had been traveling, studying, interviewing, observing, and
had failed to get at the key that would let him into the Athshean mind. He didn’t even
know where the lock was. He had studied the Athsheans’ sleeping-habits and found
that they apparently had no sleeping-habits. He had wired countless electrodes onto
countless furry green skulls, and failed to make any sense at all out of the familiar
patterns, the spindles and jags, the alphas and deltas and thetas, that appeared on the
graph. It was Selver who had made him understand, at last, the Athshean significance
of the word ‘dream,’ which was also the word for ‘root,’ and so hand him the key of
the kingdom of the forest people. It was with Selver as EEG subject that he had first
seen with comprehension the extraordinary impulse-patterns of a brain entering a
dream-state neither sleeping nor awake: a condition which related to Terran
dreaming-sleep as the Parthenon to a mud hut: the same thing basically, but with the
addition of complexity, quality, and control.

What then, what more?

Selver might have escaped. He stayed, first as a valet, then (through one of
Lyubov’s few useful perquisites as spesh) as Scientific Aide, still locked up nightly
with all other creechies in the pen (the Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Personnel
Quarters). “I’ll fly you up to Tuntar and work with you there,” Lyubov had said,
about the third time he talked with Selver, “for God’s sake why stay here?”—“My
wife, Thele, is in the pen,” Selver had said. Lyubov had tried to get her released, but
she was in the HQ kitchen, and the sergeants who managed the kitchen-gang resented
any interference from “brass” and “speshes.” Lyubov had to be very careful, lest they
take out their resentment on the woman. She and Selver had both seemed willing to
wait patiently until both could escape or be freed. Male and female creechies were
strictly segregated in the pens—why, no one seemed to know—and husband and wife
rarely saw each other. Lyubov managed to arrange meetings for them in his hut,
which he had to himself at the north end of town. It was when Thele was returning to
HQ from one such meeting that Davidson had seen her and apparently been struck by
her frail, frightened grace. He had had her brought to his quarters that night, and had
raped her.

He had killed her in the act, perhaps; this had happened before, a result of the
physical disparity; or else she had stopped living. Like some Terrans, the Athsheans
had the knack of the authentic death-wish, and could cease to live. In either case it
was Davidson who had killed her. Such murders had occurred before. What had not
occurred before was what Selver did, the second day after her death.

Lyubov had got there only at the end. He could recall the sounds; himself running
down Main Street in hot sunlight; the dust, the knot of men. The whole thing could
have lasted only five minutes, a long time for a homicidal fight. When Lyubov got
there Selver was blinded with blood, a sort of toy for Davidson to play with, and yet
he had picked himself up and was coming back, not with berserk rage but with
intelligent despair. He kept coming back. It was Davidson who was scared into rage
at last by that terrible persistence; knocking Selver down with a side-blow he had
moved forward lifting his booted foot to stamp on the skull. Even as he moved,
Lyubov had broken into the circle. He stopped the fight (for whatever blood-thirst the
ten or twelve men watching had had, was more than appeased, and they backed
Lyubov when he told Davidson hands off); and thenceforth he hated Davidson, and
was hated by him, having come between the killer and his death.

For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the
murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.

Lyubov had picked up Selver, a light weight in his arms. The mutilated face had
pressed against his shirt so that the blood soaked through against his own skin. He
had taken Selver to his own bungalow, splinted his broken wrist, done what he could
for his face, kept him in his own bed, night after night tried to talk to him, to reach
him in the desolation of his grief and shame. It was, of course, against regulations.

Nobody mentioned the regulations to him. They did not have to. He knew he was
forfeiting most of what favor he had ever had with the officers of the colony.

He had been careful to keep on the right side of HQ, objecting only to extreme
cases of brutality against the natives, using persuasion not defiance, and conserving
what shred of power and influence he had. He could not prevent the exploitation of
the Athsheans. It was much worse than his training had led him to expect, but he
could do little about it here and now. His reports to the Administration and to the
Committee on Rights might—after the roundtrip of 54 years—have some effect;
Terra might even decide that the Open Colony policy for Athshe was a bad mistake.
Better 54 years late than never. If he lost the tolerance of his superiors here they
would censor or invalidate his reports, and there would be no hope at all.

But he was too angry now to keep up his strategy. To hell with the others, if they
insisted on seeing his care of a friend as an insult to Mother Earth and a betrayal of
the colony. If they labeled him ‘creechie-lover’ his usefulness to the Athsheans would
be impaired; but he could not set a possible, general good above Selver’s imperative
need. You can’t save a people by selling your friend. Davidson, curiously infuriated
by the minor injuries Selver had done him and by Lyubov’s interference, had gone
around saying he intended to finish off that rebel creechie; he certainly would do so if
he got the chance. Lyubov stayed with Selver night and day for two weeks, and then
flew him out of Central and put him down in a west coast town, Broter, where he had
relatives.

There was no penalty for aiding slaves to escape, since the Athsheans were not
slaves at all except in fact: they were Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Personnel.

Lyubov was not even reprimanded. But the regular officers distrusted him totally,
instead of partially, from then on; and even his colleagues in the Special Services, the
exobiologist, the ag and forestry coordinators, the ecologists, variously let him know
that he had been irrational, quixotic, or stupid. “Did you think you were coming on a
picnic?” Gosse had demanded.

“No. I didn’t think it would be any bloody picnic,” Lyubov answered, morose.

“I can’t see why any hilfer voluntarily ties himself up to an Open Colony. You
know the people you’re studying are going to get plowed under, and probably wiped
out. It’s the way things are. It’s human nature, and you must know you can’t change
that. Then why come and watch the process? Masochism?”

“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we
wipe out is part of human nature.—Is it much pleasanter for an ecologist, really?”

Gosse ignored this. “All right then, write up your descriptions. But keep out of the
carnage. A biologist studying a rat colony doesn’t start reaching in and rescuing pet
rats of his that get attacked, you know.”

At this Lyubov had blown loose. He had taken too much. “No, of course not,” he
said. “A rat can be a pet, but not a friend. Selver is my friend. In fact he’s the only
man on this world whom I consider to be a friend.” That had hurt poor old Gosse,
who wanted to be a father-figure to Lyubov, and it had done nobody any good. Yet it
had been true. And the truth shall make you free…I like Selver, respect him; saved
him; suffered with him; fear him. Selver is my friend.

Selver is a god.

So the little green crone had said as if everybody knew it, as flatly as she might
have said So-and-so is a hunter. “Selver sha’ab.” What did sha’ab mean, though?

Many words of the Women’s Tongue, the everyday speech of the Athsheans, came
from the Men’s Tongue that was the same in all communities, and these words often
were not only two-syllabled but two-sided. They were coins, obverse and reverse.

Sha’ab meant god, or numinous entity, or powerful being; it also meant something
quite different, but Lyubov could not remember what. By this stage in his thinking, he
was home in his bungalow, and had only to look it up in the dictionary which he and
Selver had compiled in four months of exhausting but harmonious work. Of course:
sha’ab, translator.

It was almost too pat, too apposite.

Were the two meanings connected? Often they were, yet not so often as to
constitute a rule. If a god was a translator, what did he translate? Selver was indeed a
gifted interpreter, but that gift had found expression only through the fortuity of a
truly foreign language having been brought into his world. Was a sha’ab one who
translated the language of dream and philosophy, the Men’s Tongue, into the
everyday speech? But all Dreamers could do that. Might he then be one who could
translate into waking life the central experience of vision: one serving as a link
between the two realities, considered by the Athsheans as equal, the dream-time and
the world-time, whose connections, though vital, are obscure. A link: one who could
speak aloud the perceptions of the subconscious. To ‘speak’ that tongue is to act. To
do a new thing. To change or to be changed, radically, from the root. For the root is
the dream.

And the translator is the god. Selver had brought a new word into the language of
his people. He had done a new deed. The word, the deed, murder. Only a god could
lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds.

But had he learned to kill his fellowmen among his own dreams of outrage and
bereavement, or from the undreamed-of-actions of the strangers? Was he speaking his
own language, or was he speaking Captain Davidson’s? That which seemed to rise
from the root of his own suffering and express his own changed being, might in fact
be an infection, a foreign plague, which would not make a new people of his race, but
would destroy them.

It was not in Raj Lyubov’s nature to think, “What can I do?” Character and
training disposed him not to interfere in other men’s business. His job was to find out
what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be
enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. But even the
most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced
with a choice between commission and omission. “What are they doing?” abruptly
becomes, “What are we doing?” and then, “What must I do?”

That he had reached such a point of choice now, he knew, and yet did not know
clearly why, nor what alternatives were offered him.

He could do no more to improve the Athsheans’ chance of survival at the
moment; Lepennon, Or, and the ansible had done more than he had hoped to see done
in his lifetime. The Administration on Terra was explicit in every ansible
communication, and Colonel Dongh, though under pressure from some of his staff
and the logging bosses to ignore the directives, was carrying out orders. He was a
loyal officer; and besides, the Shackleton would be coming back to observe and
report on how orders were being carried out. Reports home meant something, now
that this ansible, this machina ex machina, functioned to prevent all the comfortable
old colonial autonomy, and make you answerable within your own lifetime for what
you did. There was no more fifty-four-year margin for error. Policy was no longer
static. A decision by the League of Worlds might now lead overnight to the colony’s
being limited to one Land, or forbidden to cut trees, or encouraged to kill natives—no
telling. How the League worked and what sort of policies it was developing could not
yet be guessed from the flat directives of the Administration. Dongh was worried by
these multiple-choice futures, but Lyubov enjoyed them. In diversity is life and where
there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.

The colonists were letting the Athsheans alone and they were letting the colonists
alone. A healthy situation, and one not to be disturbed unnecessarily. The only thing
likely to disturb it was fear.

At the moment the Athsheans might be expected to be suspicious and still
resentful, but not particularly afraid. As for the panic felt in Centralville at news of
the Smith Camp massacre, nothing had happened to revive it. No Athshean anywhere
had shown any violence since; and with the slaves gone, the creechies all vanished
back into their forests, there was no more constant irritation of xenophobia. The
colonists were at last beginning to relax.

If Lyubov reported that he had seen Selver at Tuntar, Dongh and the others would
be alarmed. They might insist on trying to capture Selver and bring him in for trial.

The Colonial Code forbade prosecution of a member of one planetary society under
the laws of another, but the Court Martial over-rode such distinctions. They could try,
convict, and shoot Selver. With Davidson brought back from New Java to give
evidence. Oh no, Lyubov thought, shoving the dictionary onto an overcrowded shelf.

Oh no, he thought, and thought no more about it. So he made his choice without even
knowing he had made one.

He turned in a brief report that next day. It said that Tuntar was going about its
business as usual, and that he had not been turned away or threatened. It was a
soothing report, and the most inaccurate one Lyubov ever wrote. It omitted
everything of significance: the headwoman’s non-appearance, Tubab’s refusal to
greet Lyubov, the large number of strangers in town, the young huntress’ expression,
Selver’s presence…Of course that last was an intentional omission, but otherwise the
report was quite factual, he thought; he had merely omitted subjective impressions, as
a scientist should. He had a severe migraine while writing the report, and a worse one
after submitting it.

He dreamed a lot that night, but could not remember his dreams in the morning.

Late in the second night after his visit to Tuntar he woke, and in the hysterical
whooping of the alarm-siren and the thudding of explosions he faced, at last, what he
had refused. He was the only man in Centralville not taken by surprise. In that
moment he knew what he was: a traitor.

And yet even now it was not clear in his mind that this was an Athshean raid. It
was the terror in the night.

His own hut had been ignored, standing in its yard away from other houses;
perhaps the trees around it protected it, he thought as he hurried out. The center of
town was all on fire. Even the stone cube of HQ burned from within like a broken
kiln. The ansible was in there: the precious link. There were fires also in the direction
of the helicopter port and the Field. Where had they gotten the explosives? How had
the fires got going all at once? All the buildings along both sides of Main Street, built
of wood, were burning; the sound of the burning was terrible. Lyubov ran toward the
fires. Water flooded the way; he thought at first it was from a fire-hose, then realized
the main from the river Menend was flooding uselessly over the ground while the
houses burned with that hideous sucking roar. How had they done this? There were
guards, there were always guards in jeeps at the Field…Shots: volleys, the yatter of a
machine gun. All around Lyubov were small running figures, but he ran among them
without giving them much thought. He was abreast of the Hostel now, and saw a girl
standing in the doorway, fire flickering at her back and a clear escape before her. She
did not move. He shouted at her, then ran across the yard to her and wrested her
hands free of the doorjambs which she clung to in panic, pulling her away by force,
saying gently, “Come on, honey, come on.” She came then, but not quite soon
enough. As they crossed the yard the front of the upper story, blazing from within,
fell slowly forward, pushed by the timbers of the collapsing roof. Shingles and beams
shot out like shell-fragments; a blazing beam-end struck Lyubov and knocked him
sprawling. He lay face down in the firelit lake of mud. He did not see a little green-
furred huntress leap at the girl, drag her down backward, and cut her throat. He did
not see anything.

Chapter Six

NO songs were sung that night. There was only shouting and silence. When the flying
ships burned Selver exulted, and tears came into his eyes, but no words into his
mouth. He turned away in silence, the fire thrower heavy in his arms, to lead his
group back into the city.

Each group of people from the West and North was led by an ex-slave like
himself, one who had served the yumens in Central and knew the buildings and ways
of the city.

Most of the people who came to the attack that night had never seen the yumen
city; many of them had never seen a yumen. They had come because they followed
Selver, because they were driven by the evil dream and only Selver could teach them
how to master it. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, men and women; they
had waited in utter silence in the rainy darkness all around the edges of the city, while
the ex-slaves, two or three at a time, did those things which they judged must be done
first: break the water pipe, cut the wires that carried light from Generator House,
break into and rob the Arsenal. The first deaths, those of guards, had been silent,
accomplished with hunting weapons, noose, knife, arrow, very quickly, in the dark.

The dynamite, stolen earlier in the night from the logging camp ten miles south, was
prepared in the Arsenal, the basement of HQ Building, while fires were set in other
places; and then the alarm went off and the fires blazed and both night and silence
fled. Most of the thunderclap and tree-fall crashing of gunfire came from the yumens
defending themselves, for only ex-slaves had taken weapons from the Arsenal and
used them; all the rest kept to their own lances, knives, and bows. But it was the
dynamite, placed and ignited by Reswan and others who had worked in the loggers’
slave-pen, that made the noise that conquered all other noises, and blew out the walls
of the HQ Building and destroyed the hangars and the ships.

There were about seventeen hundred yumens in the city that night, about five
hundred of them female; all the yumen females were said to be there now, that was
why Selver and the others had decided to act, though not all the people who wished to
come had yet gathered. Between four and five thousand men and women had come
through the forests to the Meeting at Endtor, and from there to this place, to this
night.

The fires burned huge, and the smell of burning and of butchering was foul.

Selver’s mouth was dry and his throat sore, so that he could not speak, and longed
for water to drink. As he led his group down the middle path of the city, a yumen
came running toward him, looming huge in the black and dazzle of the smoky air.

Selver lifted the fire thrower and pulled back on the tongue of it, even as the yumen
slipped in mud and fell scrambling to its knees. No hissing jet of flame sprang from
the machine, it had all been spent on burning the airships that had not been in the
hangar. Selver dropped the heavy machine. The yumen was not armed, and was male.

Selver tried to say, “Let him run away,” but his voice was weak, and two men,
hunters of the Abtam Glades, had leaped past him even as he spoke, holding their
long knives up. The big, naked hands clutched at air, and dropped limp. The big
corpse lay in a heap on the path. There were many others lying dead, there in what
had been the center of the city. There was not much noise any more except the noise
of the fires.

Selver parted his lips and hoarsely sent up the home-call that ends the hunt; those
with him took it up more clearly and loudly, in carrying falsetto; other voices
answered it, near and far off in the mist and reek and flame-shot darkness of the
night. Instead of leading his group at once from the city, he signaled them to go on,
and himself went aside, onto the muddy ground between the path and a building
which had burned and fallen. He stepped across a dead female yumen and bent over
one that lay pinned down under a great, charred beam of wood. He could not see the
features obliterated by mud and shadow.

It was not just; it was not necessary; he need not have looked at that one among
so many dead. He need not have known him in the dark. He started to go after his
group. Then he turned back; straining, lifted the beam off Lyubov’s back; knelt down,
slipping one hand under the heavy head so that Lyubov seemed to lie easier, his face
clear of the earth; and so knelt there, motionless.

He had not slept for four days and had not been still to dream for longer than that
—he did not know how long. He had acted, spoken, traveled, planned, night and day,
ever since he left Broter with his followers from Cadast. He had gone from city to
city speaking to the people of the forest, telling them the new thing, waking them
from the dream into the world, arranging the thing done this night, talking, always
talking and hearing others talk, never in silence and never alone. They had listened,
they had heard and had come to follow him, to follow the new path. They had taken
up the fire they feared into their own hands: taken up the mastery over the evil dream:
and loosed the death they feared upon their enemy. All had been done as he said it
should be done. All had gone as he said it would go. The Lodges and many dwellings
of the yumens were burned, their airships burned or broken, their weapons stolen or
destroyed: and their females were dead. The fires were burning out, the night growing
very dark, fouled with smoke. Selver could scarcely see; he looked up to the east,
wondering if it were nearing dawn. Kneeling there in the mud among the dead he
thought, This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me.

In the dream, Lyubov’s lips moved a little against the palm of his own hand;
Selver looked down and saw the dead man’s eyes open. The glare of dying fires
shone on the surface of them. After a while he spoke Selver’s name.

“Lyubov, why did you stay here? I told you to be out of the city this night.” So
Selver spoke in dream, harshly, as if he were angry at Lyubov.

“Are you the prisoner?” Lyubov said, faintly and not lifting his head, but in so
commonplace a voice that Selver knew for a moment that this was not the dream-
time but the world-time, the forest’s night. “Or am I?”

“Neither, both, how do I know? All the engines and machines are burned. All the
women are dead. We let the men run away if they would. I told them not to set fire to
your house, the books will be all right. Lyubov, why aren’t you like the others?”

“I am like them. A man. Like them. Like you.”

“No. You are different—”

“I am like them. And so are you. Listen, Selver. Don’t go on. You must not go on
killing other men. You must go back…to your own…to your roots.”

“When your people are gone, then the evil dream will stop.”

“Now,” Lyubov said, trying to lift his head, but his back was broken. He looked
up at Selver and opened his mouth to speak. His gaze dropped away and looked into
the other time, and his lips remained parted, unspeaking. His breath whistled a little
in his throat.

They were calling Selver’s name, many voices far away, calling over and over. “I
can’t stay with you, Lyubov!” Selver said in tears, and when there was no answer
stood up and tried to run away. But in the dream-darkness he could go only very
slowly, like one wading through deep water. The Ash Spirit walked in front of him,
taller than Lyubov or any yumen, tall as a tree, not turning its white mask to him. As
Selver went he spoke to Lyubov: “We’ll go back,” he said. “I will go back. Now. We
will go back, now, I promise you, Lyubov!”

But his friend, the gentle one, who had saved his life and betrayed his dream,
Lyubov did not reply. He walked somewhere in the night near Selver, unseen, and
quiet as death.

A group of the people of Tuntar came on Selver wandering in the dark, weeping
and speaking, overmastered by dream; they took him with them in their swift return
to Endtor.

In the makeshift Lodge there, a tent on the riverbank, he lay helpless and insane
for two days and nights, while the Old Men tended him. All that time people kept
coming in to Endtor and going out again, returning to the Place of Eshsen which had
been called Central, burying their dead there and the alien dead: of theirs more than
three hundred, of the others more than seven hundred. There were about five hundred
yumens locked into the compound, the creechie-pens, which, standing empty and
apart, had not been burned. As many more had escaped, some of whom had got to the
logging camps farther south, which had not been attacked; those who were still
hiding and wandering in the forest or the Cut Lands were hunted down. Some were
killed, for many of the younger hunters and huntresses still heard only Selver’s voice
saying Kill them. Others had left the night of killing behind them as if it had been a
nightmare, the evil dream that must be understood lest it be repeated; and these, faced
with a thirsty, exhausted yumen cowering in a thicket, could not kill him. So maybe
he killed them. There were groups of ten and twenty yumens, armed with logger’s
axes and hand-guns, though few had ammunition left; these groups were tracked until
sufficient numbers were hidden in the forest about them, then overpowered, bound,
and led back to Eshsen. They were all captured within two or three days, for all that
part of Sornol was swarming with the people of the forest, there had never in the
knowledge of any man been half or a tenth so great a gathering of people in one
place; some still coming in from distant towns and other Lands, others already going
home again. The captured yumens were put in among the others in the compound,
though it was overcrowded and the huts were too small for yumens. They were
watered, fed twice daily, and guarded by a couple of hundred armed hunters at all
times.

In the afternoon following the Night of Eshsen, an airship came rattling out of the
east and flew low as if to land, then shot upward like a bird of prey that misses its
kill, and circled the wrecked landing-place, the smoldering city, and the Cut Lands.

Reswan had seen to it that the radios were destroyed, and perhaps it was the silence
of the radios that had brought the airship from Kushil or Rieshwel, where there were
three small towns of yumens. The prisoners in the compound rushed out of the
barracks and yelled at the machine whenever it came rattling overhead, and once it
dropped an object on a small parachute into the compound: at last it rattled off into
the sky.

There were four such winged ships left on Athshe now, three on Kushil and one
on Rieshwel, all of the small kind that carried four men; they also carried machine
guns and flamethrowers, and they weighed much on the minds of Reswan and the
others, while Selver lay lost to them, walking the cryptic ways of the other time.

He woke into the world-time on the third day, thin, dazed, hungry, silent. After he
had bathed in the river and had eaten, he listened to Reswan and the headwoman of
Berre and the others chosen as leaders. They told him how the world had gone while
he dreamed. When he had heard them all, he looked about at them and they saw the
god in him. In the sickness of disgust and fear that followed the Night of Eshsen,
some of them had come to doubt. Their dreams were uneasy and full of blood and
fire; they were surrounded all day by strangers, people come from all over the forests,
hundreds of them, thousands, all gathered here like kites to carrion, none knowing
another: and it seemed to them as if the end of things had come and nothing would
ever be the same, or be right, again. But in Server’s presence they remembered
purpose; their distress was quietened, and they waited for him to speak.

“The killing is all done,” he said. “Make sure that everyone knows that.” He
looked round at them. “I have to talk with the ones in the compound. Who is leading
them in there?”

“Turkey, Flapfeet, Weteyes,” said Reswan, the ex-slave.

“Turkey’s alive? Good. Help me get up, Greda, I have eels for bones…”

When he had been afoot a while he was stronger, and within the hour he set off
for Eshsen, two hours’ walk from Endtor.

When they came Reswan mounted a ladder set against the compound wall and
bawled in the pidgin-English taught the slaves, “Dong-a come to gate hurry-up-
quick!”

Down in the alleys between the squat cement barracks, some of the yumens
yelled and threw clods of dirt at him. He ducked, and waited.

The old Colonel did not come out, but Gosse, whom they called Weteyes, came
limping out of a hut and called up to Reswan, “Colonel Dongh is ill, he cannot come
out.”

“Ill what kind?”

“Bowels, water-illness. What you want?”

“Talk-talk.—My lord god,” Reswan said in his own language, looking down at
Selver, “the Turkey’s hiding, do you want to talk with Weteyes?”

“All right.”

“Watch the gate here, you bowmen!—To gate, Mis-ter Goss-a, hurry-up-quick!”

The gate was opened just wide enough and long enough for Gosse to squeeze out.

He stood in front of it alone, facing the group by Selver. He favored one leg, injured
on the Night of Eshsen. He was wearing torn pajamas, mudstained and rain-sodden.

His graying hair hung in lank festoons around his ears and over his forehead. Twice
the height of his captors, he held himself very stiff, and stared at them in courageous,
angry misery. “What you want?”

“We must talk, Mr. Gosse,” said Selver, who had learned plain English from
Lyubov. “I’m Selver of the Ash Tree of Eshreth. I’m Lyubov’s friend.”

“Yes, I know you. What have you to say?”

“I have to say that the killing is over, if that be made a promise kept by your
people and my people. You may all go free, if you will gather in your people from the
logging camps in South Sornol, Kushil, and Rieshwel, and make them all stay
together here. You may live here where the forest is dead, where you grow your seed-
grasses. There must not be any more cutting of trees.”

Gosse’s face had grown eager: “The camps weren’t attacked?”

“No.”

Gosse said nothing.

Selver watched his face, and presently spoke again: “There are less than two
thousand of your people left living in the world, I think. Your women are all dead. In
the other camps there are still weapons; you could kill many of us. But we have some
of your weapons. And there are more of us than you could kill. I suppose you know
that, and that’s why you have not tried to have the flying ships bring you fire-
throwers, and kill the guards, and escape. It would be no good; there really are so
many of us. If you make the promise with us it will be much the best, and then you
can wait without harm until one of your Great Ships comes, and you can leave the
world. That will be in three years, I think.”

“Yes, three local years—How do you know that?”

“Well, slaves have ears, Mr. Gosse.”

Gosse looked straight at him at last. He looked away, fidgeted, tried to ease his
leg. He looked back at Selver, and away again. “We had already ‘promised’ not to
hurt any of your people. It’s why the workers were sent home. It did no good, you
didn’t listen—”

“It was not a promise made to us.”

“How can we make any sort of agreement or treaty with a people who have no
government, no central authority?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure you know what a promise is. This one was soon
broken.”

“What do you mean? By whom, how?”

“In Rieshwel, New Java. Fourteen days ago. A town was burned and its people
killed by yumens of the Camp in Rieshwel.”

“It’s a lie. We were in radio contact with New Java right along, until the massacre.
Nobody was killing natives there or anywhere else.”

“You’re speaking the truth you know,” Selver said, “I speak the truth I know. I
accept your ignorance of the killings on Rieshwel; but you must accept my telling
you that they were done. This remains: the promise must be made to us and with us,
and it must be kept. You’ll wish to talk about these matters with Colonel Dongh and
the others.”

Gosse moved as if to re-enter the gate, then turned back and said in his deep,
hoarse voice, “Who are you, Selver? Did you—was it you that organized the attack?
Did you lead them?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then all this blood is on your head,” Gosse said, and with sudden savagery,

“Lyubov’s too, you know. He’s dead—your ‘friend Lyubov.’ ”

Selver did not understand the idiom. He had learned murder, but of guilt he knew
little beyond the name. As his gaze locked for a moment with Gosse’s pale, resentful
stare, he felt afraid. A sickness rose up in him, a mortal chill. He tried to put it away
from him, shutting his eyes a moment. At last he said, “Lyubov is my friend, and so
not dead.”

“You’re children,” Gosse said with hatred. “Children, savages. You have no
conception of reality. This is no dream, this is real! You killed Lyubov. He’s dead.
You killed the women—the women—you burned them alive, slaughtered them like
animals!”

“Should we have let them live?” said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse’s,
but softly, his voice singing a little. “To breed like insects in the carcass of the World?
To overrun us? We killed them to sterilize you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse.
Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the
world and his own dreams. You’re not sane: there’s not one man in a thousand of you
who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You
sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you
spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children,
you are grown men, but insane. And that’s why we had to kill you, before you drove
us mad. Now go back and talk about reality with the other insane men. Talk long, and
well!”

The guards opened the gate, threatening the crowding yumens inside with their
spears; Gosse re-entered the compound, his big shoulders hunched as if against the
rain.

Selver was very tired. The headwoman of Berre and another woman came to him
and walked with him, his arms over their shoulders so that if he stumbled he should
not fall. The young hunter Greda, a cousin of his Tree, joked with him, and Selver
answered light-headedly, laughing. The walk back to Endtor seemed to go on for
days.

He was too weary to eat. He drank a little hot broth and lay down by the Men’s
Fire. Endtor was no town but a mere camp by the great river, a favorite fishing place
for all the cities that had once been in the forest round about, before the yumens
came. There was no Lodge. Two fire-rings of black stone and a long grassy bank over
the river where tents of hide and plaited rush could be set up, that was Endtor. The
river Menend, the master river of Sornol, spoke ceaselessly in the world and in the
dream at Endtor.

There were many old men at the fire, some whom he knew from Broter and
Tuntar and his own destroyed city Eshreth, some whom he did not know; he could
see in their eyes and gestures, and hear in their voices, that they were Great
Dreamers; more dreamers than had ever been gathered in one place before, perhaps.
Lying stretched out full length, his head raised on his hands, gazing at the fire, he
said, “I have called the yumens mad. Am I mad myself?”

“You don’t know one time from the other,” said old Tubab, laying a pine-knot on
the fire, “because you did not dream either sleeping or waking for far too long. The
price for that takes long to pay.”

“The poisons the yumens take do much the same as does the lack of sleep and
dream,” said Heben, who had been a slave both at Central and at Smith Camp. “The
yumens poison themselves in order to dream. I saw the dreamer’s look in them after
they took the poisons. But they couldn’t call the dreams, nor control them, nor weave
nor shape nor cease to dream; they were driven, overpowered. They did not know
what was within them at all. So it is with a man who hasn’t dreamed for many days.
Though he be the wisest of his Lodge, still he’ll be mad, now and then, here and
there, for a long time after. He’ll be driven, enslaved. He will not understand
himself.”

A very old man with the accent of South Sornol laid his hand on Selver’s
shoulder, caressing him, and said, “My dear young god, you need to sing, that would
do you good.”

“I can’t. Sing for me.”

The old man sang; others joined in, their voices high and reedy, almost tuneless,
like the wind blowing in the water-reeds of Endtor. They sang one of the songs of the
ash-tree, about the delicate parted leaves that turn yellow in autumn when the berries
turn red, and one night the first frost silvers them.

While Selver was listening to the song of the Ash, Lyubov lay down beside him.

Lying down he did not seem so monstrously tall and large-limbed. Behind him was
the half-collapsed, fire-gutted building, black against the stars. “I am like you,” he
said, not looking at Selver, in that dream-voice which tries to reveal its own untruth.
Selver’s heart was heavy with sorrow for his friend. “I’ve got a headache,” Lyubov
said in his own voice, rubbing the back of his neck as he always did, and at that
Selver reached out to touch him, to console him. But he was shadow and firelight in
the world-time, and the old men were singing the song of the Ash, about the small
white flowers on the black branches in spring among the parted leaves.

The next day the yumens imprisoned in the compound sent for Selver. He came to
Eshsen in the afternoon, and met with them outside the compound, under the
branches of an oak tree, for all Selver’s people felt a little uneasy under the bare open
sky. Eshsen had been an oak grove; this tree was the largest of the few the colonists
had left standing. It was on the long slope behind Lyubov’s bungalow, one of the six
or eight houses that had come through the night of the burning undamaged. With
Selver under the oak were Reswan, the headwoman of Berre, Greda of Cadast, and
others who wished to be in on the parley, a dozen or so in all. Many bowmen kept
guard, fearing the yumens might have hidden weapons, but they sat behind bushes or
bits of wreckage left from the burning, so as not to dominate the scene with the hint
of threat. With Gosse and Colonel Dongh were three of the yumens called officers
and two from the logging camp, at the sight of one of whom, Benton, the ex-slaves
drew in their breaths. Benton used to punish “lazy creechies” by castrating them in
public.

The Colonel looked thin, his normally yellow-brown skin a muddy yellow-gray;
his illness had been no sham. “Now the first thing is,” he said when they were all
settled, the yumens standing, Selver’s people squatting or sitting on the damp, soft
oak-leaf mold, “the first thing is that I want first to have a working definition of just
precisely what these terms of yours mean and what they mean in terms of guaranteed
safety of my personnel under my command here.”

There was a silence.

“You understand English, don’t you, some of you?”

“Yes. I don’t understand your question, Mr. Dongh.”

“Colonel Dongh, if you please!”

“Then you’ll call me Colonel Selver, if you please.” A singing note came into
Selver’s voice; he stood up, ready for the contest, tunes running in his mind like
rivers.

But the old yumen just stood there, huge and heavy, angry yet not meeting the
challenge. “I did not come here to be insulted by you little humanoids,” he said. But
his lips trembled as he said it. He was old, and bewildered, and humiliated. All
anticipation of triumph went out of Selver. There was no triumph in the world any
more, only death. He sat down again. “I didn’t intend insult, Colonel Dongh,” he said
resignedly. “Will you repeat your question, please?”

“I want to hear your terms, and then you’ll hear ours, that’s all there is to it.”

Selver repeated what he had said to Gosse.

Dongh listened with apparent impatience. “All right. Now you don’t realize that
we’ve had a functioning radio in the prison compound for three days now.” Selver did
know this, as Reswan had at once checked on the object dropped by the helicopter,
lest it be a weapon; the guards reported it was a radio, and he let the yumens keep it.
Selver merely nodded. “So we’ve been in contact with the three outlying camps, the
two on King Land and one on New Java, right along, and if we had decided to make a
break for it and escape from that prison compound then it would have been very
simple for us to do that, with the helicopters to drop us weapons and covering our
movements with their mounted weapons, one flamethrower could have got us out of
the compound and in case of need they also have the bombs that can blow up an
entire area. You haven’t seen those in action of course.”

“If you’d left the compound, where would you have gone?”

“The point is, without introducing into this any beside the point or erroneous
factors, now we are certainly greatly outnumbered by your forces, but we have the
four helicopters at the camps, which there’s no use you trying to disable as they are
under fully armed guard at all times now, and also all the serious fire-power, so that
the cold reality of the situation is we can pretty much call it a draw and speak in
positions of mutual equality. This of course is a temporary situation. If necessary we
are enabled to maintain a defensive police action to prevent all-out war. Moreover we
have behind us the entire fire-power of the Terran Interstellar Fleet, which could blow
your entire planet right out of the sky. But these ideas are pretty intangible to you, so
let’s just put it as plainly and simply as I can, that we’re prepared to negotiate with
you, for the present time, in terms of an equal frame of reference.”

Selver’s patience was short; he knew his ill-temper was a symptom of his
deteriorated mental state, but he could no longer control it. “Go on, then!”

“Well, first I want it clearly understood that as soon as we got the radio we told
the men at the other camps not to bring us weapons and not to try any airlift or rescue
attempts, and reprisals were strictly out of order—”

“That was prudent. What next?”

Colonel Dongh began an angry retort, then stopped; he turned very pale. “Isn’t
there anything to sit down on,” he said.

Selver went around the yumen group, up the slope, into the empty two-room
bungalow, and took the folding desk-chair. Before he left the silent room he leaned
down and laid his cheek on the scarred, raw wood of the desk, where Lyubov had
always sat when he worked with Selver or alone; some of his papers were lying there
now; Selver touched them lightly. He carried the chair out and set it in the rainwet
dirt for Dongh. The old man sat down, biting his lips, his almond-shaped eyes narrow
with pain.

“Mr. Gosse, perhaps you can speak for the Colonel,” Selver said. “He isn’t well.”

“I’ll do the talking,” Benton said, stepping forward, but Dongh shook his head
and muttered, “Gosse.”

With the Colonel as auditor rather than speaker it went more easily. The yumens
were accepting Selver’s terms. With a mutual promise of peace, they would withdraw
all their outposts and live in one area, the region they had forested in Middle Sornol:
about 1700 square miles of rolling land, well watered. They undertook not to enter
the forest; the forest people undertook not to trespass on the Cut Lands.

The four remaining airships were the cause of some argument. The yumens
insisted they needed them to bring their people from the other islands to Sornol. Since
the machines carried only four men and would take several hours for each trip, it
appeared to Selver that the yumens could get to Eshsen rather sooner by walking, and
he offered them ferry service across the straits; but it appeared that yumens never
walked far. Very well, they could keep the hoppers for what they called the ‘Airlift
Operation.’ After that, they were to destroy them. Refusal. Anger. They were more
protective of their machines than of their bodies. Selver gave in, saying they could
keep the hoppers if they flew them only over the Cut Lands and if the weapons in
them were destroyed. Over this they argued, but with one another, while Selver
waited, occasionally repeating the terms of his demand, for he was not giving in on
this point.

“What’s the difference, Benton,” the old Colonel said at last, furious and shaky,
“can’t you see that we can’t use the damned weapons? There’s three million of these
aliens all scattered out all over every damned island, all covered with trees and
undergrowth, no cities, no vital network, no centralized control. You can’t disable a
guerrilla type structure with bombs, it’s been proved, in fact my own part of the world
where I was born proved it for about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one
after the other in the twentieth century. And we’re not in a position until a ship comes
to prove our superiority. Let the big stuff go, if we can hold on to the sidearms for
hunting and self-defense!”

He was their Old Man, and his opinion prevailed in the end, as it might have done
in a Men’s Lodge. Benton sulked. Gosse started to talk about what would happen if
the truce was broken, but Selver stopped him. “These are possibilities, we aren’t yet
done with certainties. Your Great Ship is to return in three years, that is three and a
half years of your count. Until that time you are free here. It will not be very hard for
you. Nothing more will be taken away from Centralville, except some of Lyubov’s
work that I wish to keep. You still have most of your tools of tree-cutting and ground-
moving; if you need more tools, the iron-mines of Peldel are in your territory. I think
all this is clear. What remains to be known is this: When that ship comes, what will
they seek to do with you, and with us?”

“We don’t know,” Gosse said. Dongh amplified: “If you hadn’t destroyed the
ansible communicator first thing off, we might be receiving some current information
on these matters, and our reports would of course influence the decisions that may be
made concerning a finalized decision on the status of this planet, which we might
then expect to begin to implement before the ship returns from Prestno. But due to
wanton destruction due to your ignorance of your own interests, we haven’t even got
a radio left that will transmit over a few hundred miles.”

“What is the ansible?” The word had come up before in this talk; it was a new one
to Selver.

“ICD,” the Colonel said, morose.

“A kind of radio,” Gosse said, arrogant. “It put us in instant touch with our home-
world.”

“Without the 27-year waiting?”

Gosse stared down at Selver. “Right. Quite right. You learned a great deal from
Lyubov, didn’t you?”

“Didn’t he just,” said Benton. “He was Lyubov’s little green buddyboy. He picked
up everything worth knowing and a bit more besides. Like all the vital points to
sabotage, and where the guards would be posted, and how to get into the weapon
stockpile. They must have been in touch right up to the moment the massacre
started.”

Gosse looked uneasy. “Raj is dead. All that’s irrelevant now, Benton. We’ve got
to establish—”

“Are you trying to infer in some way that Captain Lyubov was involved in some
activity that could be called treachery to the Colony, Benton?” said Dongh, glaring
and pressing his hands against his belly. “There were no spies or treachers on my
staff, it was absolutely handpicked before we ever left Terra and I know the kind of
men I have to deal with.”

“I’m not inferring anything, Colonel. I’m saying straight out that it was Lyubov
stirred up the creechies, and if orders hadn’t been changed on us after that Fleet ship
was here, it never would have happened.”

Gosse and Dongh both started to speak at once. “You are all very ill,” Selver
observed, getting up and dusting himself off, for the damp brown oak-leaves clung to
his short body-fur as to silk. “I’m sorry we’ve had to hold you in the creechie-pen, it
is not a good place for the mind. Please send for your men from the camps. When all
are here and the large weapons have been destroyed, and the promise has been
spoken by all of us, then we shall leave you alone. The gates of the compound will be
opened when I leave here today. Is there more to be said?”

None of them said anything. They looked down at him. Seven big men, with tan
or brown hairless skin, cloth-covered, dark-eyed, grim-faced; twelve small men,
green or brownish-green, fur-covered, with the large eyes of the seminocturnal
creature, with dreamy faces; between the two groups, Selver, the translator, frail,
disfigured, holding all their destinies in his empty hands. Rain fell softly on the
brown earth about them.

“Farewell then,” Selver said, and led his people away.

“They’re not so stupid,” said the headwoman of Berre as she accompanied Selver
back to Endtor. “I thought such giants must be stupid, but they saw that you’re a god,
I saw it in their faces at the end of the talking. How well you talk that gobble-gubble.
Ugly they are, do you think even their children are hairless?”

“That we shall never know, I hope.”

“Ugh, think of nursing a child that wasn’t furry. Like trying to suckle a fish.”

“They are all insane,” said old Tubab, looking deeply distressed. “Lyubov wasn’t
like that, when he used to come to Tuntar. He was ignorant, but sensible. But these
ones, they argue, and sneer at the old man, and hate each other, like this,” and he
contorted his gray-furred face to imitate the expressions of the Terrans, whose words
of course he had not been able to follow. “Was that what you said to them, Selver,
that they’re mad?”

“I told them that they were ill. But then, they’ve been defeated, and hurt, and
locked in that stone cage. After that anyone might be ill and need healing.”

“Who’s to heal them,” said the headwoman of Berre, “their women are all dead.
Too bad for them. Poor ugly things—great naked spiders they are, ugh!”

“They are men, men, like us, men,” Selver said, his voice shrill and edged like a
knife.

“Oh, my dear lord god, I know it, I only meant they look like spiders,” said the
old woman, caressing his cheek. “Look here, you people, Selver is worn out with this
going back and forth between Endtor and Eshsen, let’s sit down and rest a bit.”

“Not here,” Selver said. They were still in the Cut Lands, among stumps and
grassy slopes, under the bare sky. “When we come under the trees…” He stumbled,
and those who were not gods helped him to walk along the road.

Chapter Seven

DAVIDSON found a good use for Major Muhamed’s tape recorder. Somebody had to
make a record of events on New Tahiti, a history of the crucifixion of the Terran
Colony. So that when the ships came from Mother Earth they could learn the truth. So
that future generations could learn how much treachery and cowardice and folly
humans were capable of, and how much courage against all odds. During his free
moments—not much more than moments since he had assumed command—he
recorded the whole story of the Smith Camp Massacre, and brought the record up to
date for New Java, and for King and Central also, as well as he could with the garbled
hysterical stuff that was all he got by way of news from Central HQ.

Exactly what had happened there nobody would ever know, except the creechies,
for the humans were trying to cover up their own betrayals and mistakes. The outlines
were clear, though. An organized bunch of creechies, led by Selver, had been let into
the Arsenal and the Hangars, and turned loose with dynamite, grenades, guns, and
flamethrowers to totally destruct the city and slaughter the humans. It was an inside
job, the fact that HQ was the first place blown up proved that. Lyubov of course had
been in on it, and his little green buddies had proved just as grateful as you might
expect, and cut his throat like the others. At least, Gosse and Benton claimed to have
seen him dead the morning after the massacre. But could you believe any of them,
actually? You could assume that any human left alive in Central after that night was
more or less of a traitor. A traitor to his race.

The women were all dead, they claimed. That was bad enough, but what was
worse, there was no reason to believe it. It was easy for the creechies to take
prisoners in the woods, and nothing would be easier to catch than a terrified girl
running out of a burning town. And wouldn’t the little green devils like to get hold of
a human girl and try experiments on her? God knows how many of the women were
still alive in the creechie warrens, tied down underground in one of those stinking
holes, being touched and felt and crawled over and defiled by the filthy, hairy little
monkeymen. It was unthinkable. But by God sometimes you have to be able to think
about the unthinkable.

A hopper from King had dropped the prisoners at Central a receiver-transmitter
the day after the massacre, and Muhamed had taped all his exchanges with Central
starting that day. The most incredible one was a conversation between him and
Colonel Dongh. The first time he played it Davidson had torn the thing right off the
reel and burned it. Now he wished he had kept it, for the records, as a perfect proof of
the total incompetence of the C.O.’s at both Central and New Java. He had given in to
his own hotbloodedness, destroying it. But how could he sit there and listen to the
recording of the Colonel and the Major discussing total surrender to the creechies,
agreeing not to try retaliation, not to defend themselves, to give up all their big
weapons, to all squeeze together onto a bit of land picked out for them by the
creechies, a reservation conceded to them by their generous conquerors, the little
green beasts. It was incredible. Literally incredible.

Probably old Ding Dong and Moo were not actually traitors by intent. They had
just gone spla, lost their nerve. It was this damned planet that did it to them. It took a
very strong personality to withstand it. There was something in the air, maybe pollens
from all those trees, acting as some kind of drug maybe, that made ordinary humans
begin to get as stupid and out of touch with reality as the creechies were. Then, being
so outnumbered, they were pushovers for the creechies to wipe out.

It was too bad Muhamed had had to be put out of the way, but he would never
have agreed to accept Davidson’s plans, that was clear; he’d been too far gone.

Anyone who’d heard that incredible tape would agree. So it was better he got shot
before he really knew what was going on, and now no shame would attach to his
name, as it would to Dongh’s and all the other officers left alive at Central.
Dongh hadn’t come on the radio lately. Usually it was Juju Sereng, in
Engineering. Davidson had used to pal around a lot with Juju and had thought of him
as a friend, but now you couldn’t trust anybody any more. And Juju was another
asiatiform. It was really queer how many of them had survived the Centralville
Massacre; of those he’d talked to, the only non-asio was Gosse. Here in Java the
fifty-five loyal men remaining after the reorganization were mostly eurafs like
himself, some afros and afrasians, not one pure asio. Blood tells, after all. You
couldn’t be fully human without some blood in your veins from the Cradle of Man.

But that wouldn’t stop him from saving those poor yellow bastards at Central, it just
helped explain their moral collapse under stress.

“Can’t you realize what kind of trouble you’re making for us, Don?” Juju Sereng
had demanded in his flat voice. “We’ve made a formal truce with the creechies. And
we’re under direct orders from Earth not to interfere with the hilfs and not to retaliate.
Anyhow how the hell can we retaliate? Now all the fellows from King Land and
South Central are here with us we’re still less than two thousand, and what have you
got there on Java, about sixty-five men isn’t it? Do you really think two thousand
men can take on three million intelligent enemies, Don?”

“Juju, fifty men can do it. It’s a matter of will, skill, and weaponry.”

“Batshit! But the point is, Don, a truce has been made. And if it’s broken, we’ve
had it. It’s all that keeps us afloat, now. Maybe when the ship gets back from Prestno
and sees what happened, they’ll decide to wipe out the creechies. We don’t know. But
it does look like the creechies intend to keep the truce, after all it was their idea, and
we have got to. They can wipe us out by sheer numbers, any time, the way they did
Centralville. There were thousands of them. Can’t you understand that, Don?”

“Listen, Juju, sure I understand. If you’re scared to use the three hoppers you’ve
still got there, you could send ’em over here, with a few fellows who see things like
we do here. If I’m going to liberate you fellows singlehanded, I sure could use some
more hoppers for the job.”

“You aren’t going to liberate us, you’re going to incinerate us, you damned fool.
Get that last hopper over here to Central now: that’s the Colonel’s personal order to
you as Acting C.O. Use it to fly your men here; twelve trips, you won’t need more
than four local dayperiods. Now act on those orders, and get to it.” Ponk, off the air—
afraid to argue with him anymore.

At last he worried that they might send their three hoppers over and actually
bomb or strafe New Java Camp; for he was, technically, disobeying orders, and old
Dongh wasn’t tolerant of independent elements. Look how he’d taken it out on
Davidson already, for that tiny reprisal-raid on Smith. Initiative got punished. What
Ding Dong liked was submission, like most officers. The danger with that is that it
can make the officer get submissive himself. Davidson finally realized, with a real
shock, that the hoppers were no threat to him, because Dongh, Sereng, Gosse, even
Benton were afraid to send them. The creechies had ordered them to keep the
hoppers inside the Human Reservation: and they were obeying orders.

Christ, it made him sick. It was time to act. They’d been waiting around nearly
two weeks now. He had his camp well defended; they had strengthened the stockade
fence and built it up so that no little green monkeymen could possibly get over it, and
that clever kid Aabi had made lots of neat home-made land mines and sown ’em all
around the stockade in a hundred-meter belt. Now it was time to show the creechies
that they might push around those sheep on Central but on New Java it was men they
had to deal with. He took the hopper up and with it guided an infantry squad of
fifteen to a creechie-warren south of camp. He’d learned how to spot the things from
the air; the giveaway was the orchards, concentrations of certain kinds of tree, though
not planted in rows like humans would. It was incredible how many warrens there
were once you learned to spot them. The forest was crawling with the things. The
raiding party burned up that warren by hand, and then flying back with a couple of
his boys he spotted another, less than four kilos from camp. On that one, just to write
his signature real clear and plain for everybody to read, he dropped a bomb. Just a
firebomb, not a big one, but baby did it make the green fur fly. It left a big hole in the
forest, and the edges of the hole were burning.

Of course that was his real weapon when it actually came to setting up massive
retaliation. Forest fire. He could set one of these whole islands on fire, with bombs
and firejelly dropped from the hopper. Have to wait a month or two, till the rainy
season was over. Should he burn King or Smith or Central? King first, maybe, as a
little warning, since there were no humans left there. Then Central, if they didn’t get
in line.

“What are you trying to do?” said the voice on the radio, and it made him grin, it
was so agonized, like some old woman being held up. “Do you know what you’re
doing, Davidson?”

“Yep.”

“Do you think you’re going to subdue the creechies?” It wasn’t Juju this time, it
might be that bigdome Gosse, or any of them; no difference; they all bleated baa.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said with ironic mildness.

“You think if you keep burning up villages they’ll come to you and surrender—
three million of them. Right?”

“Maybe.”

“Look, Davidson,” the radio said after a while, whining and buzzing; they were
using some kind of emergency rig, having lost the big transmitter, along with that
phony ansible which was no loss. “Look, is there somebody else standing by there we
can talk to?”

“No; they’re all pretty busy. Say, we’re doing great here, but we’re out of dessert
stuff, you know, fruit cocktail, peaches, crap like that. Some of the fellows really miss
it. And we were due for a load of maryjanes when you fellows got blown up. If I sent
the hopper over, could you spare us a few crates of sweet stuff and grass?”

A pause. “Yes, send it on over.”

“Great. Have the stuff in a net, and the boys can hook it without landing.” He
grinned.
There was some fussing around at the Central end, and all of a sudden old Dongh
was on, the first time he’d talked to Davidson. He sounded feeble and out of breath
on the whining shortwave. “Listen, Captain, I want to know if you fully realize what
form of action your actions on New Java are going to be forcing me into taking. If
you continue to disobey your orders. I am trying to reason with you as a reasonable
and loyal soldier. In order to ensure the safety of my personnel here at Central I’m
going to be put into the position of being forced to tell the natives here that we can’t
assume any responsibility at all for your actions.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“What I’m trying to make clear to you is that means that we are going to be put
into the position of having to tell them that we can’t stop you from breaking the truce
there on Java. Your personnel there is sixty-six men, is that correct, well I want those
men safe and sound here at Central with us to wait for the Shackleton and keep the
Colony together. You’re on a suicide course and I’m responsible for those men you
have there with you.”

“No, you’re not, sir. I am. You just relax. Only when you see the jungle burning,
pick up and get out into the middle of a Strip, because we don’t want to roast you
folks along with the creechies.”

“Now listen, Davidson, I order you to hand your command over to Lt. Temba at
once and report to me here,” said the distant whining voice, and Davidson suddenly
cut off the radio, sickened. They were all spla, playing at still being soldiers, in full
retreat from reality. There were actually very few men who could face reality when
the going got tough.

As he expected, the local creechies did absolutely nothing about his raids on the
warrens. The only way to handle them, as he’d known from the start, was to terrorize
them and never let up on them. If you did that, they knew who was boss, and
knuckled under. A lot of the villages within a thirty-kilo radius seemed to be deserted
now before he got to them, but he kept his men going out to burn them up every few
days.

The fellows were getting rather jumpy. He had kept them logging, since that’s
what forty-eight of the fifty-five loyal survivors were, loggers. But they knew that the
robo-freighters from Earth wouldn’t be called down to load up the lumber, but would
just keep coming in and circling in orbit waiting for the signal that didn’t come. No
use cutting trees just for the hell of it; it was hard work. Might as well burn them. He
exercised the men in teams, developing fire-setting techniques. It was still too rainy
for them to do much, but it kept their minds busy. If only he had the other three
hoppers, he’d really be able to hit and run. He considered a raid on Central to liberate
the hoppers, but did not yet mention this idea even to Aabi and Temba, his best men.

Some of the boys would get cold feet at the idea of an armed raid on their own HQ.

They kept talking about “when we get back with the others.” They didn’t know those
others had abandoned them, betrayed them, sold their skins to the creechies. He
didn’t tell them that, they couldn’t take it.

One day he and Aabi and Temba and another good sound man would just take the
hopper over, then three of them jump out with machine guns, take a hopper apiece,
and so home again, home again, jiggety jog. With four nice egg-beaters to beat eggs
with. Can’t make an omelet without beating eggs. Davidson laughed aloud, in the
darkness of his bungalow. He kept that plan hidden just a little longer, because it
tickled him so much to think about it.

After two more weeks they had pretty well closed out the creechie warrens within
walking distance, and the forest was neat and tidy. No vermin. No smoke-puffs over
the trees. Nobody hopping out of bushes and flopping down on the ground with their
eyes shut, waiting for you to stomp them. No little green men. Just a mess of trees
and some burned places. The boys were getting really edgy and mean; it was time to
make the hopper-raid. He told his plan one night to Aabi, Temba, and Post.
None of them said anything for a minute, then Aabi said, “What about fuel,
Captain?”

“We got enough fuel.”

“Not for four hoppers; wouldn’t last a week.”

“You mean there’s only a month’s supply left for this one?”

Aabi nodded.

“Well then, we pick up a little fuel too, looks like.”

“How?”

“Put your minds to it.”

They all sat there looking stupid. It annoyed him. They looked to him for
everything. He was a natural leader, but he liked men who thought for themselves
too. “Figure it out, it’s your line of work, Aabi,” he said, and went out for a smoke,
sick of the way everybody acted, like they’d lost their nerve. They just couldn’t face
the cold hard facts.

They were low on maryjanes now and he hadn’t had one for a couple of days. It
didn’t do anything for him. The night was overcast and black, damp, warm, smelling
like spring. Ngenene went by walking like an ice-skater, or almost like a robot on
treads; he turned slowly through a gliding step and gazed at Davidson, who stood on
the bungalow porch in the dim light from the doorway. He was a power-saw operator,
a huge man. “The source of my energy is connected to the Great Generator I cannot
be switched off,” he said in a level tone, gazing at Davidson.

“Get to your barracks and sleep it off!” Davidson said in the whipcrack voice that
nobody ever disobeyed, and after a moment Ngenene skated carefully on, ponderous
and graceful. Too many of the men were using hallies more and more heavily. There
was plenty, but the stuff was for loggers relaxing on Sundays, not for soldiers of a
tiny outpost marooned on a hostile world. They had no time for getting high, for
dreaming. He’d have to lock the stuff up. Then some of the boys might crack. Well,
let ’em crack. Can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. Maybe he could send
them back to Central in exchange for some fuel. You give me two, three tanks of gas
and I’ll give you two, three warm bodies, loyal soldiers, good loggers, just your type,
a little far gone in bye-bye dreamland…

He grinned, and was going back inside to try this one out on Temba and the
others, when the guard posted up on the lumberyard smoke stack yelled. “They’re
coming!” he screeched out in a high voice, like a kid playing Blacks and Rhodesians.
Somebody else over on the west side of the stockade began yelling too. A gun went
off.

And they came. Christ, they came. It was incredible. There were thousands of
them, thousands. No sound, no noise at all, until that screech from the guard; then one
gunshot; then an explosion—a land mine going up—and another, one after another,
and hundreds and hundreds of torches flaring up lit one from another and being
thrown and soaring through the black wet air like rockets, and the walls of the
stockade coming alive with creechies, pouring in, pouring over, pushing, swarming,
thousands of them. It was like an army of rats Davidson had seen once when he was a
little kid, in the last Famine, in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up.
Something had driven the rats out of their holes and they had come up in daylight,
seething up over the wall, a pulsing blanket of fur and eyes and little hands and teeth,
and he had yelled for his mom and run like crazy, or was that only a dream he’d had
when he was a kid? It was important to keep cool. The hopper was parked in the
creechie-pen; it was still dark over on that side and he got there at once. The gate was
locked, he always kept it locked in case one of the weak sisters got a notion of flying
off to Papa Ding Dong some dark night. It seemed to take a long time to get the key
out and fit it in the lock and turn it right, but it was just a matter of keeping cool, and
then it took a long time to sprint to the hopper and unlock it. Post and Aabi were with
him now. At last came the huge rattle of the rotors, beating eggs, covering up all the
weird noises, the high voices yelling and screeching and singing. Up they went, and
hell dropped away below them: a pen full of rats, burning.

“It takes a cool head to size up an emergency situation quickly,” Davidson said.

“You men thought fast and acted fast. Good work. Where’s Temba?”

“Got a spear in his belly,” Post said.

Aabi, the pilot, seemed to want to fly the hopper, so Davidson let him. He
clambered into one of the rear seats and sat back, letting his muscles relax. The forest
flowed beneath them, black under black.

“Where you heading, Aabi?”

“Central.”

“No. We don’t want to go to Central.”

“Where do we want to go to?” Aabi said with a kid of womanish giggle. “New
York? Peking?”

“Just keep her up a while, Aabi, and circle camp. Big circles. Out of earshot.”

“Captain, there isn’t any Java Camp any more by now,” said Post, a logging-crew
foreman, a stocky, steady man.

“When the creechies are through burning the camp, we’ll come in and burn
creechies. There must be four thousand of them all in one place there. There’s six
flamethrowers in the back of this helicopter. Let’s give ’em about twenty minutes.
Start with the jelly bombs and then catch the ones that run with the flamethrowers.”

“Christ,” Aabi said violently, “some of our guys might be there, the creechies
might take prisoners, we don’t know. I’m not going back there and burn up humans,
maybe.” He had not turned the hopper.

Davidson put the nose of his revolver against the back of Aabi’s skull and said,

“Yes, we’re going back; so pull yourself together, baby, and don’t give me a lot of
trouble.”

“There’s enough fuel in the tank to get us to Central, Captain,” the pilot said. He
kept trying to duck his head away from the touch of the gun, like it was a fly
bothering him. “But that’s all. That’s all we got.”

“Then we’ll get a lot of mileage out of it. Turn her, Aabi.”

“I think we better go on to Central, Captain,” Post said in his stolid voice, and this
ganging up against him enraged Davidson so much that reversing the gun in his hand
he struck out fast as a snake and clipped Post over the ear with the gun-butt. The
logger just folded over like a Christmas card, and sat there in the front seat with his
head between his knees and his hands hanging to the floor. “Turn her, Aabi,”
Davidson said, the whiplash in his voice. The helicopter swung around in a wide arc.

“Hell, where’s camp, I never had this hopper up at night without any signal to
follow,” Aabi said, sounding dull and snuffly like he had a cold.

“Go east and look for the fire,” Davidson said, cold and quiet. None of them had
any real stamina, not even Temba. None of them had stood by him when the going
got really tough. Sooner or later they all joined up against him, because they just
couldn’t take it the way he could. The weak conspire against the strong, the strong
man has to stand alone and look out for himself. It just happened to be the way things
are. Where was the camp?

They should have been able to see the burning buildings for miles in this blank
dark, even in the rain. Nothing showed. Gray-black sky, black ground. The fires must
have gone out. Been put out. Could the humans have driven off the creechies? After
he’d escaped? The thought went like a spray of icewater through his mind. No, of
course not, not fifty against thousands. But by God there must be a lot of pieces of
blown-up creechie lying around on the minefields, anyway. It was just that they’d
come so damned thick. Nothing could have stopped them. He couldn’t have planned
for that. Where had they come from? There hadn’t been any creechies in the forest
anywhere around for days and days. They must have poured in from somewhere,
from all directions, sneaking along in the woods, coming up out of their holes like
rats. There wasn’t any way to stop thousands and thousands of them like that. Where
the hell was camp? Aabi was tricking, faking course. “Find the camp, Aabi,” he said
softly.

“For Christ’s sake I’m trying to,” the boy said.

Post never moved, folded over there by the pilot.

“It couldn’t just disappear, could it, Aabi. You got seven minutes to find it.”

“Find it yourself,” Aabi said, shrill and sullen.

“Not till you and Post get in line, baby. Take her down lower.”
After a minute Aabi said, “That looks like the river.”

There was a river, and a big clearing; but where was Java Camp? It didn’t show
up as they flew north over the clearing. “This must be it, there isn’t any other big
clearing is there,” Aabi said, coming back over the treeless area. Their landing-lights
glared but you couldn’t see anything outside the tunnels of the lights; it would be
better to have them off. Davidson reached over the pilot’s shoulder and switched the
lights off. Blank wet dark was like black towels slapped on their eyes. “For Christ’s
sake!” Aabi screamed, and flipping the lights back on slewed the hopper left and up,
but not fast enough. Trees leaned hugely out of the night and caught the machine.

The vanes screamed, hurling leaves and twigs in a cyclone through the bright
lanes of the lights, but the boles of the trees were very old and strong. The little
winged machine plunged, seemed to lurch and tear itself free, and went down
sideways into the trees. The lights went out. The noise stopped.

“I don’t feel so good,” Davidson said. He said it again. Then he stopped saying it,
for there was nobody to say it to. Then he realized he hadn’t said it anyway. He felt
groggy. Must have hit his head. Aabi wasn’t there. Where was he? This was the
hopper. It was all slewed around, but he was still in his seat. It was so dark, like being
blind. He felt around, and so found Post, inert, still doubled up, crammed in between
the front seat and the control panel. The hopper trembled whenever Davidson moved,
and he figured out at last that it wasn’t on the ground but wedged in between trees,
stuck like a kite. His head was feeling better, and he wanted more and more to get out
of the black, tilted-over cabin. He squirmed over into the pilot’s seat and got his legs
out, hung by his hands, and could not feel ground, only branches scraping his
dangling legs. Finally he let go, not knowing how far he’d fall, but he had to get out
of that cabin. It was only a few feet down. It jolted his head, but he felt better
standing up. If only it wasn’t so dark, so black. He had a torch in his belt, he always
carried one at night around camp. But it wasn’t there. That was funny. It must have
fallen out. He’d better get back into the hopper and get it. Maybe Aabi had taken it.

Aabi had intentionally crashed the hopper, taken Davidson’s torch, and made a break
for it. The slimy little bastard, he was like all the rest of them. The air was black and
full of moisture, and you couldn’t tell where to put your feet, it was all roots and
bushes and tangles. There were noises all around, water dripping, rustling, tiny
noises, little things sneaking around in the darkness. He’d better get back up into the
hopper, get his torch. But he couldn’t see how to climb back up. The bottom edge of
the doorway was just out of reach of his fingers.

There was a light, a faint gleam seen and gone away off in the trees. Aabi had
taken the torch and gone off to reconnoiter, get orientated, smart boy. “Aabi!” he
called in a piercing whisper. He stepped on something queer while he was trying to
see the light among the trees again. He kicked at it with his boots, then put a hand
down on it, cautiously, for it wasn’t wise to go feeling things you couldn’t see. A lot
of wet stuff, slick, like a dead rat. He withdrew his hand quickly. He felt in another
place after a while; it was a boot under his hand, he could feel the crossings of the
laces. It must be Aabi lying there right under his feet. He’d got thrown out of the
hopper when it came down. Well, he’d deserved it with his Judas trick, trying to run
off to Central. Davidson did not like the wet feel of the unseen clothes and hair. He
straightened up. There was the light again, black-barred by near and distant tree-
trunks, a distant glow that moved.

Davidson put his hand to his holster. The revolver was not in it.

He’d had it in his hand, in case Post or Aabi acted up. It was not in his hand. It
must be up in the helicopter with his torch.

He stood crouching, immobile; then abruptly began to run. He could not see
where he was going. Tree-trunks jolted him from side to side as he knocked into
them, and roots tripped up his feet. He fell full length, crashing down among bushes.

Getting to hands and knees he tried to hide. Bare, wet twigs dragged and scraped over
his face. He squirmed farther into the bushes. His brain was entirely occupied by the
complex smells of rot and growth, dead leaves, decay, new shoots, fronds, flowers,
the smells of night and spring and rain. The light shone full on him. He saw the
creechies.

He remembered what they did when cornered, and what Lyubov had said about it.

He turned over on his back and lay with his head tipped back, his eyes shut. His heart
stuttered in his chest.

Nothing happened.

It was hard to open his eyes, but finally he managed to. They just stood there: a
lot of them, ten or twenty. They carried those spears they had for hunting, little toy-
looking things but the iron blades were sharp, they could cut right through your guts.

He shut his eyes and just kept lying there.

And nothing happened.

His heart quieted down, and it seemed like he could think better. Something
stirred down inside him, something almost like laughter. By God they couldn’t get
him down! If his own men betrayed him, and human intelligence couldn’t do any
more for him, then he used their own trick against them—played dead like this, and
triggered this instinct reflex that kept them from killing anybody who took that
position. They just stood around him, muttering at each other. They couldn’t hurt him.

It was as if he was a god.

“Davidson.”

He had to open his eyes again. The resin-flare carried by one of the creechies still
burned, but it had grown pale, and the forest was dim gray now, not pitch-black. How
had that happened? Only five or ten minutes had gone by. It was still hard to see but it
wasn’t night any more. He could see the leaves and branches, the forest. He could see
the face looking down at him. It had no color in this toneless twilight of dawn. The
scarred features looked like a man’s. The eyes were like dark holes.

“Let me get up,” Davidson said suddenly in a loud, hoarse voice. He was shaking
with cold from lying on the wet ground. He could not lie there with Selver looking
down at him.

Selver was emptyhanded, but a lot of the little devils around him had not only
spears but revolvers. Stolen from his stockpile at camp. He struggled to his feet. His
clothes clung icy to his shoulders and the backs of his legs, and he could not stop
shaking.

“Get it over with,” he said. “Hurry-up-quick!”

Selver just looked at him. At least now he had to look up, way up, to meet
Davidson’s eyes.

“Do you wish me to kill you now?” he inquired. He had learned that way of
talking from Lyubov, of course; even his voice, it could have been Lyubov talking. It
was uncanny.

“It’s my choice, is it?”

“Well, you have lain all night in the way that means you wished us to let you live;
now do you want to die?”

The pain in his head and stomach, and his hatred for this horrible little freak that
talked like Lyubov and that had got him at its mercy, the pain and the hatred
combined and set his belly churning, so he retched and was nearly sick. He shook
with cold and nausea. He tried to hold on to courage. He suddenly stepped forward a
pace and spat in Selver’s face.

There was a little pause, and then Selver, with a kind of dancing movement, spat
back. And laughed. And made no move to kill Davidson. Davidson wiped the cold
spittle off his lips.

“Look, Captain Davidson,” the creechie said in that quiet little voice that made
Davidson go dizzy and sick, “we’re both gods, you and I. You’re an insane one, and
I’m not sure whether I’m sane or not. But we are gods. There will never be another
meeting in the forest like this meeting now between us. We bring each other such
gifts as gods bring. You gave me a gift, the killing of one’s kind, murder. Now, as
well as I can, I give you my people’s gift, which is not killing. I think we each find
each other’s gift heavy to carry. However, you must carry it alone. Your people at
Eshsen tell me that if I bring you there, they have to make a judgment on you and kill
you, it’s their law to do so. So, wishing to give you life, I can’t take you with the
other prisoners to Eshsen; and I can’t leave you to wander in the forest, for you do
too much harm. So you’ll be treated like one of us when we go mad. You’ll be taken
to Rendlep where nobody lives any more, and left there.”

Davidson stared at the creechie, could not take his eyes off it. It was as if it had
some hypnotic power over him. He couldn’t stand this. Nobody had any power over
him. Nobody could hurt him. “I should have broken your neck right away, that day
you tried to jump me,” he said, his voice still hoarse and thick.

“It might have been best,” Selver answered. “But Lyubov prevented you. As he
now prevents me from killing you.—All the killing is done now. And the cutting of
trees. There aren’t trees to cut on Rendlep. That’s the place you call Dump Island.
Your people left no trees there, so you can’t make a boat and sail from it. Nothing
much grows there any more, so we shall have to bring you food and wood to burn.
There’s nothing to kill on Rendlep. No trees, no people. There were trees and people,
but now there are only the dreams of them. It seems to me a fitting place for you to
live, since you must live. You might learn how to dream there, but more likely you
will follow your madness through to its proper end, at last.”

“Kill me now and quit your damned gloating.”

“Kill you?” Selver said, and his eyes looking up at Davidson seemed to shine,
very clear and terrible, in the twilight of the forest. “I can’t kill you, Davidson. You’re
a god. You must do it yourself.”

He turned and walked away, light and quick, vanishing among the gray trees
within a few steps.

A noose slipped over Davidson’s head and tightened a little on his throat. Small
spears approached his back and sides. They did not try to hurt him. He could run
away, make a break for it, they didn’t dare kill him. The blades were polished, leaf-
shaped, sharp as razors. The noose tugged gently at his neck. He followed where they
led him.

Chapter Eight

SELVER had not seen Lyubov for a long time. That dream had gone with him to
Rieshwel. It had been with him when he spoke the last time to Davidson. Then it had
gone, and perhaps it slept now in the grave of Lyubov’s death at Eshsen, for it never
came to Selver in the town of Broter where he now lived.

But when the great ship returned, and he went to Eshsen, Lyubov met him there.

He was silent and tenuous, very sad, so that the old carking grief awoke in Selver.
Lyubov stayed with him, a shadow in the mind, even when he met the yumens
from the ship. These were people of power; they were very different from all yumens
he had known, except his friend, but they were much stronger men than Lyubov had
been.

His yumen speech had gone rusty, and at first he mostly let them talk. When he
was fairly certain what kind of people they were, he brought forward the heavy box
he had carried from Broter. “Inside this there is Lyubov’s work,” he said, groping for
the words. “He knew more about us than the others do. He learned my language and
the Men’s Tongue; we wrote all that down. He understood somewhat how we live and
dream. The others do not. I’ll give you the work, if you’ll take it to the place he
wished.”

The tall, white-skinned one, Lepennon, looked happy, and thanked Selver, telling
him that the papers would indeed be taken where Lyubov wished, and would be
highly valued. That pleased Selver. But it had been painful to him to speak his
friend’s name aloud, for Lyubov’s face was still bitterly sad when he turned to it in
his mind. He withdrew a little from the yumens, and watched them. Dongh and Gosse
and others of Eshsen were there along with the five from the ship. The new ones
looked clean and polished as new iron. The old ones had let the hair grow on their
faces, so that they looked a little like huge, black-furred Athsheans. They still wore
clothes, but the clothes were old and not kept clean. They were not thin, except for
the Old Man, who had been ill ever since the Night of Eshsen; but they all looked a
little like men who are lost or mad.

This meeting was at the edge of the forest, in that zone where by tacit agreement
neither the forest people nor the yumens had built dwellings or camped for these past
years. Selver and his companions settled down in the shade of a big ash-tree that
stood out away from the forest eaves. Its berries were only small green knots against
the twigs as yet, its leaves were long and soft, labile, summer-green. The light
beneath the great tree was soft, complex with shadows.

The yumens consulted and came and went, and at last one came over to the ash-
tree. It was the hard one from the ship, the Commander. He squatted down on his
heels near Selver, not asking permission but not with any evident intention of
rudeness. He said, “Can we talk a little?”

“Certainly.”

“You know that we’ll be taking all the Terrans away with us. We brought a second
ship with us to carry them. Your world will no longer be used as a colony.”

“This was the message I heard at Broter, when you came three days ago.”

“I wanted to be sure that you understand that this is a permanent arrangement.
We’re not coming back. Your world has been placed under the League Ban. What
that means in your terms is this: I can promise you that no one will come here to cut
the trees or take your lands, so long as the League lasts.”

“None of you will ever come back,” Selver said, statement or question.

“Not for five generations. None. Then perhaps a few men, ten or twenty, no more
than twenty, might come to talk to your people, and study your world, as some of the
men here were doing.”

“The scientists, the speshes,” Selver said. He brooded. “You decide matters all at
once, your people,” he said, again between statement and question.

“How do you mean?” The Commander looked wary.

“Well, you say that none of you shall cut the trees of Athshe: and all of you stop.
And yet you live in many places. Now if a headwoman in Karach gave an order, it
would not be obeyed by the people of the next village, and surely not by all the
people in the world at once…”

“No, because you haven’t one government over all. But we do—now—and I
assure you its orders are obeyed. By all of us at once. But, as a matter of fact, it seems
to me from the story we’ve been told by the colonists here, that when you gave an
order, Selver, it was obeyed by everybody on every island here at once. How did you
manage that?”

“At that time I was a god,” Selver said, expressionless.

After the Commander had left him, the long white one came sauntering over and
asked if he might sit down in the shade of the tree. He had tact, this one, and was
extremely clever. Selver was uneasy with him. Like Lyubov, this one would be
gentle; he would understand, and yet would himself be utterly beyond understanding.

For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest. That
was why the presence of Lyubov in his mind remained painful to him, while the
dreams in which he saw and touched his dead wife Thele were precious and full of
peace.

“When I was here before,” Lepennon said, “I met this man, Raj Lyubov. I had
very little chance to speak with him, but I remember what he said; and I’ve had time
to read some of his studies of your people, since. His work, as you say. It’s largely
because of that work of his that Athshe is now free of the Terran Colony. This
freedom had become the direction of Lyubov’s life, I think. You, being his friend, will
see that his death did not stop him from arriving at his goal, from finishing his
journey.”

Selver sat still. Uneasiness turned to fear in his mind. This one spoke like a Great
Dreamer.

He made no response at all.

“Will you tell me one thing, Selver. If the question doesn’t offend you. There will
be no more questions after it…There were the killings: at Smith Camp, then at this
place, Eshsen, then finally at New Java Camp where Davidson led the rebel group.
That was all. No more since then…Is that true? Have there been no more killings?”

“I did not kill Davidson.”

“That does not matter,” Lepennon said, misunderstanding; Selver meant that
Davidson was not dead, but Lepennon took him to mean that someone else had killed
Davidson. Relieved to see that the yumen could err, Selver did not correct him.

“There has been no more killing, then?”

“None. They will tell you,” Selver said, nodding toward the Colonel and Gosse.

“Among your own people, I mean. Athsheans killing Athsheans.”

Selver was silent.

He looked up at Lepennon, at the strange face, white as the mask of the Ash
Spirit, that changed as it met his gaze.

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a
new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this
across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this,
it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back
into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is
insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill
one another.”

Lepennon laid his long hand on Selver’s hand, so quickly and gently that Selver
accepted the touch as if the hand were not a stranger’s. The green-gold shadows of
the ash leaves flickered over them.

“But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no
reason,” Lepennon said, his face as anxious and sad as Lyubov’s face. “We shall go.
Within two days we shall be gone. All of us. Forever. Then the forests of Athshe will
be as they were before.”

Lyubov came out of the shadows of Selver’s mind and said, “I shall be here.”

“Lyubov will be here,” Selver said. “And Davidson will be here. Both of them.
Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you
came. But I do not think they will.”

When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.

Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations of their society. For every blow against the invaders is a blow to the humanity of the Athsheans. And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.

Winner of the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella

The Word for World Is Forest was originally published in the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972. It was published as a standalone book in 1976 by Berkley/Putnam, and is currently published by Tor Books. It also appears in The Hainish Novels and Stories, published in 2017 by Library of America.

Praise

“A simple story that, like most things Le Guin wrote, packs a powerful emotional and critical punch.”

—Sean Guynes, Tor.com