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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

The fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it.

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. . . .

And the world changes wholly, when a man holds in his hand the fruit of that tree, whose roots are deeper than the forest.

It doesn’t take an old man or a Great Dreamer to recognize a god!

this is why I have loved you: I dreamed of you before we met here.

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 pleasant also to be called by his own, earned title of doctor.

The conference was plainly an Investigation. Whose fault? My fault, Lyubov thought despairingly;

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

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

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.

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. . . .

“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?”

“You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.

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.

They were no more constrained than Lyubov, who had been trained to keep his mind open whether he wanted to or not.

he, too muddleheaded to compartmentalize neatly, knew that he shouldn’t believe Lepennon and Or and Yung, but did believe them, and was frightened.

from your reports. Your reports are very incomplete; censorship or stupidity have been at work.

There is no longer any excuse for acting on outdated orders; for ignorance; for irresponsible autonomy.”

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. . . .

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—”

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.

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.

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.

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—

all that bleeding-heart stuff in the so-called directives had a Hainish sound to it.

Some men, especially the asiatiforms and hindi types, are actually born traitors. Not all, but some. Certain other men are born saviors.

Holy sjit

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.

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.

Christ

Dumping them on Dump Island and letting them starve would have been actually the best final solution.

Wtf.wtfwtf

If Centralville got burned down, HQ could thank themselves. It would be what they deserved, actually.

he's right but he's wrong about why he's 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.

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.

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.

Davidson had seen it was no use almost at once. Muhamed was rigid-minded.

He as much as told Davison he didn’t consider him a trustworthy officer.

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.

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.

He could have done it singlehanded, but it was better this way. You got the sense of comradeship, of a real bond among men.

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.

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.

But the others would all see, sooner or later, that he was right. And he was right.

Lyubov couldn’t decide whether the report he’d be turning in would reassure Colonel Dongh, or not.

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.

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.

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.

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.