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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

It looked like that bigdome Kees was right and you had to leave a lot of trees standing where you planned to put farms. But he still couldn’t see why a soybean farm needed to waste a lot of space on trees if the land was managed really scientifically.

It was clear, to anybody who hadn’t gone spla from geoshock, that the ‘ansible’ messages were phonies. They might be planted right in the machine, a whole set of answers to high-probability questions, computer run.

If there was one man he hoped the creechies did get, it was big-dome Raj Lyubov, the alien-lover. Some men, especially the asiatiforms and hindi types, are actually born traitors. Not all, but some. Certain other men are born saviors. It just happened to be the way they were made, like being of euraf descent, or like having a good physique; it wasn’t anything he claimed credit for.

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.

Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch. Caress as signal and reassurance was as essential to them as it is to mother and child or to lover and lover; but its significance was social, not only maternal and sexual. It was part of their language, it was therefore patterned, codified, yet infinitely modifiable.

“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. . . .

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.

“You’re speaking the truth you know,” Selver said, “I speak the truth I know. I accept your ignorance of the killings on Rieshwel; but you must accept my telling you that they were done.

“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.”