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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

there were among them now refugees, ex-slaves, who had suffered at the Terrans’ hands and would talk about it.

That an Athshean could be provoked, by atrocious cruelty, to attempt murder, he knew: he had seen it happen—once.

Some element was missing.

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.

even if it couldn’t be justified, it made no difference. The friendship between them was too deep to be touched by moral doubt.

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.

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’?

“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. . . .

Selver had changed. He was changed, radically: from the root.

I don’t know what you are. It would be better if I had never known you.”

He was always disagreeably surprised to find how vulnerable his feelings were, how much it hurt him to be hurt.

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.

And finally there was the inevitable Freak Reaction, the flinching away from what is human but does not quite look so.

Intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that’s their arrangement.

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.

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.

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.

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 fifty-four years—have some effect; Terra might even decide that the Open Colony policy for Athshe was a bad mistake.

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.

!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

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.

His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it.

“What are they doing?” abruptly becomes, “What are we doing?” and then, “What must I do?”

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.

Lyubov enjoyed them. In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope,

The only thing likely to disturb it was fear.

It was a soothing report, and the most inaccurate one Lyubov ever wrote. It omitted everything of significance: the headwoman’s nonappearance, 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,

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.

break the water pipe, cut the wires that carried light from Generator House, break into and rob the Arsenal.

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.

This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me.

Don’t go on. You must not go on killing other men. You must go back . . . to your own . . . to your roots.”

the evil dream that must be understood lest it be repeated;

“The killing is all done,” he said. “Make sure that everyone knows that.”

“It was not a promise made to us.”

I accept your ignorance of the killings on Rieshwel; but you must accept my telling you that they were done.

He had learned murder, but of guilt he knew little beyond the name.

All anticipation of triumph went out of Selver. There was no triumph in the world any more, only death.

it appeared that yumens never walked far.

They were more protective of their machines than of their bodies.

You can’t disable a guerrilla type structure with bombs,

“These are possibilities, we aren’t yet done with certainties.

this is a great why of thinking

“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.

these ones, they argue, and sneer at the old man, and hate each other, like this,”

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.

You could assume that any human left alive in Central after that night was more or less of a traitor.

He had given in to his own hotbloodedness, destroying it.

You couldn’t be fully human without some blood in your veins from the Cradle of Man.