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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

we’re under direct orders from Earth not to interfere with the hilfs and not to retaliate.

a truce has been made. And if it’s broken, we’ve had it. It’s all that keeps us afloat, now.

“You aren’t going to liberate us, you’re going to incinerate us, you damned fool.

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.

“I can’t kill you, Davidson. You’re a god. You must do it yourself.”

Lyubov stayed with him, a shadow in the mind,

they all looked a little like men who are lost or mad.

“You decide matters all at once, your people,”

“At that time I was a god,”

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.

“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.”

“But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason,”