More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Some men, especially the asiatiforms and hindi types, are actually born traitors. Not all, but some.
Dumping them on Dump Island and letting them starve would have been actually the best final solution.
Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World.
Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.
Davidson’s cruelty would drive even Athsheans to violence.
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 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.
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.
“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?”
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.
Only a god could lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
“The killing is all done,” he said. “Make sure that every-one knows that.”
Blood tells, after all. You couldn’t be fully human without some blood in your veins from the Cradle of Man.
No use cutting trees just for the hell of it; it was hard work. Might as well burn them.
You’ll be taken to Rendlep where nobody lives any more, and left there.”
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.”
We’re not coming back. Your world has been placed under the League Ban.
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 pretences.
