The Word for World is Forest (Hainish Cycle, #5)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Earth was a tamed planet and New Tahiti wasn’t. That’s what he was here for: to tame it.

it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth.

that’s what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world-tamer.

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.”

You want to make this world into Earth’s image, eh? A desert of cement?”

The deer would be hunted because that’s what they were there for.

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.

when they came here there had been nothing. Trees. A dark huddle and jumble and tangle of trees, endless, meaningless.

Trees don't do under like nothing

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.

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.

“In that Applied History course I took in training for Far-out, it said that slavery never worked. It was uneconomical.”

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

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.

Rape too. gross

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.

It was only as he dropped down to the landing-field that he saw the charred jet, the wrecked hoppers, the burned-out hangar.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Christ, it wasn’t fair, they had the guns and he wasn’t armed.

Poor slaver

Christ, what was all this, it was a nightmare.

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!

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.

I wish he was a woman and would talk sense. . . .”

The men might have escaped, but the women were locked in more safely and could not, and they were beginning to die.

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.

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.”

They have killed us by ones, now they will kill us as they kill the trees, by hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds.”

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.

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...

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.”

“He’s a god,” Coro Mena said. Torber nodded, accepting the old man’s judgment almost with relief. “But not like the others.

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.”

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.

But the climate varied little, and the forest little, and the sea not at all.

it was always the Old Women’s choice whether to believe or not.

The door was not locked, but he knew if he opened it something bad would come in.

“A bad dream?” Ebor Dendep inquired. “They’re all bad, and all the same,”

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.

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.

It shone, in that uneasy shade, with pity and terror, with adoration.

The Great Dreamers of the Exiles in Broter have dreamed giants more numerous than the trees of the Forty Lands.

They are backward, Selver. They are insane.”

They don’t know the dream-time from the world-time, any more than a baby does.

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.

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.

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 the yumens are men, they are men unfit or untaught to dream and to act as men.

If they are men, they are evil men, having denied their own gods, afraid to see their own faces in the dark.