Ursula K. LeGuin - The Word for World is Forest

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FOR JEAN Who Went Ahead

First appeared in the Anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley edition / December 1976

Tenth printing / April 1983 Eleventh printing / April 1984

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in pan,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-07484-6

A BERKLEY BOOK « TM 757,375

The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design

are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ^

One

Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain David-son's mind when he woke, and he lay looking at diem

in die darkness for a while. One up: the new shipload of women had arrived. Believe it or not.

They were here, in Centralville, twenty-seven lightyears from Earth by NAFAL and four hours from

Smith Camp by hopper, the second batch of breeding females for the New Tahiti Colony, all sound

and clean, 212 head of prime human stock. Or prime enough, anyhow. One down: the report from Dump

Island of crop failures, massive erosion, a wipe-out. The line of 212 buxom beddable breasty

little figures faded from Davidson's mind as he saw rain pouring down onto ploughed dirt, churning

it to mud, thinning the mud to a red broth that ran down rocks into the rainbeaten sea. The

erosion had begun before he left Dump Island to run Smith Camp, and being gifted with an

exceptional visual memory, the kind they called eidetic, he could recall it now all too clearly.

It looked tike

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 wasn't like that in Ohio; if you wanted corn you grew

corn, and no space wasted on trees and stuff. But then Earth was a tamed planet and New Tahiti

wasn't. That's what he was here for: to tame it. If Dump Island was just rocks and gullies now,

then scratch it; start over on a new island and do better. Can't keep us down, we're Men. You'll

learn. what that means pretty soon, you godforsaken damn planet, Davidson thought, and he grinned

a little in the darkness of the hut, for he liked challenges. Thinking Men, he thought Women, and

again the line of little figures began to sway through his mind, smiling, jiggling.

"Ben!" he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. "Hot water get-ready,

hurry-up-quick!'' The roar woke him satis-fyingly. He stretched and scratched his chest and pulled

on his shorts and strode out of the hut into the sunlit clearing all in one easy series of

motions. A big, hard-muscled man, he enjoyed using his well-trained body. Ben, his creechie, had

the water ready and steaming over the fire* as usual, and was squatting staring at nothing, as

usual. Creechies never slept, they just sat and stared. "Breakfast. Hurry-up-quick!" Davidson

said, picking up his razor from the rough board

table where the creechie had laid it out ready with a towel and a propped-up mirror.

There was a lot to be done today, since he'd decided, that last minute before getting up, to fly

down to Central and see the new women for himself. They wouldn't last long, 212 among over two

thousand men, and like the first batch probably most of them were Colony Brides, and only twenty

or thirty had come as Recreation Staff, but those babies were real good greedy girls and he

intended to be first in line with at least one of them this time. He grinned on the left, the

right cheek remaining stiff to the whining razor.

The old creechie was moseying round taking an hour to bring his breakfast from the cookhouse.

"Hurry-up-quick!" Davidson yelled, and Ben pushed his boneless saunter into a walk. Ben was about

a meter high and his back fur was more white man green; he was old, and dumb even for a creechie,

but Davidson knew how to handle them; he could tame any of them, if it was worm the effort. It

wasn't, though. Get enough humans here, build machines and robots, make farms and cities, and

nobody would need the creechies any more. And a good thing too. For this world, New Tahiti, was

literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of

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grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real

Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth. And it would be his world. For that's

what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world-tamer. He wasn't a boastful man, but he

knew his own size. It just happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to

get it. And he always got it.

Breakfast landed warm in his belly. His good mood wasn't spoiled even by the sight of Kees Van

Slen coming towards him, fat, white, and worried, his eyes sticking out like blue golf-balls.

"Don," Kees said without greeting, "the loggers have been hunting red deer in the Strips again.

There are eighteen pair of antlers in the back room of the Lounge."

"Nobody ever stopped poachers from poaching, Kees."

"You can stop them. That's why we live under martial law, that's why the Army runs this colony. To

keep the laws."

A frontal attack from Fatty Bigdome! It was almost funny. "All right, "Davidson said reasonably,

"I could stop 'em. But look, it's the men I'm looking after; that's my job, like you said. And

it's the men mat count. Not the animals. If a little extra-legal hunting helps the men get through

this godforsaken life, men I intend to blink. They've got to have some recreation."

"They have games, sports, hobbies, films, teletapes of every major sporting event of the past

century, liquor, marijuana, bailies, and a fresh batch of women at Central, for those unsatisfied

by the Army's rather unimaginative arrangements

for hygienic homosexuality. They are spoiled rotten, your frontier heroes, and they don't need to

exterminate a rare native species 'for recreation.' If you don't act, I must record a major

infraction of Ecological Protocols in my report to Captain Godde."

"You can do mat if you see fit, Kees," said Davidson, who never lost his temper. It was sort of

pathetic the way a euro like Kees got all red in the face when he lost control of his emotions. '

"That's your job, after all. I won't hold it against you; they can do the arguing at Central and

decide who's right. See, you want to keep mis place just like it is, actually, Kees. Like one big

National Forest. To look at, to study. Great, you're a spesh. But see, we're just ordinary joes

getting the work done. Earth needs wood, needs it bad. We find wood on New Tahiti. So—we're

loggers. See, where we differ is that with you Earth doesn't come first, actually. With me it

does."

Kees looked at him sideways out of those blue golf-ball eyes. "Does it? You want to make this

world into Earth's image, eh? A desert of cement?"

"When I say Earth, Kees, I mean people. Men. You worry about deer and trees and fibreweed, fine,

that's your thing. But I like to see things in perspective, from the top down, and the top, so

far, is humans. We're here, now; and so this world's going to go our way. Like it or not, it's a

fact you have to face; it happens to be the way things are. Listen, Kees, I'm going to hop down to

Central and take a look at the new colonists! Want to come along?*'

"No thanks, Captain Davidson," the spesh said, going on towards the Lab hut. He was really mad.

All upset about those damn deer. They were great animals, all right. Davidson's vivid memory'

recalled the first one he had seen, here on Smith Land, a big red shadow, two meters at the

shoulder, a crown of narrow golden antlers, a fleet, brave beast, the finest game-animal

imaginable. Back on Earth they were using robodeer even in the High Rockies and Himalaya Parks

now, the real ones were about gone. These things were a hunter's dream. So they'd be hunted. Hell,

even the wild creechies hunted them, with their lousy little bows. The deer would be hunted

because that's what they were there for. But poor old bleeding-heart Kees couldn't see it. 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.

Davidson strode on through the settlement, morning sunlight in his eyes, the smell of sawn wood

and woodsmoke sweet on the warm air. Things looked pretty neat, for a logging camp. Hie two

hundred men here had tamed a fair patch of wilderness in just three E-months. Smith Camp: a couple

of big corruplast geodesies, forty timber huts built by creechie-tabor, the sawmill,

the burner trailing a blue plume over acres of logs and cut lumber; uphill, the airfield and the

big prefab hangar for helicopters and heavy machinery. That was all. But when they came here there

had been nothing. Trees. A dark huddle and jumble and tangle of trees, endless, meaningless. A

sluggish river overhung and choked by trees, a few creechie-warrens hidden among the trees, some

red deer, hairy monkeys, birds. And trees. Roots, boles, branches, twigs, leaves overhead and

underfoot and in your face and in your eyes, endless leaves on endless trees.

New Tahiti was mostly water, warm shallow seas broken here and there by reefs, islets,

archipelagoes, and the five big Lands that lay in a 2500-kilo arc across the Northwest Quarter-

sphere. And all those flecks and blobs of land were covered with trees. Ocean: forest. That was

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your choice on New Tahiti. Water and sunlight, or darkness and leaves.

But men were here now to end the darkness, and turn the tree-jumble into clean sawn planks, more

prized on Earth than gold. Literally, he-cause 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. Two hundred men with robosaws and haulers had already

cut eight mile-wide Strips on Smith Land, in three months. The stumps of the Strip nearest camp

were already white and punky; chemically treated, they would have fallen into fertile ash by the

time the permanent colonists, the

-fanners, came to settle Smith Land. All the farmers would have to do was plant seeds and let 'em

sprout.

It had been done once before. That was a queer thing, and the proof, actually, that New Tahiti was

intended for humans to take over. All the stuff here had come from Earth, about a million years

ago, and the evolution had followed so close a path that you recognized things at once: pine, oak,

walnut, chestnut, fir, holly, apple, ash; deer, bird, mouse, cat squirrel, monkey. The hu-manoids

on Hain-Davenant of course claimed they'd done it at the same time as they colonized Earth, but if

you listened to those ETs you'd find they claimed to have settled every planet in the Galaxy and

invented everything from sex to thumbtacks. The theories about Atlantis were a lot more realistic,

and this might well be a lost Atlantean colony. But 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. As ETs they were about standard, but as men they were a bust, they just hadn't

made it. Give 'em another million years, maybe. But the Conquistadors had arrived first. Evolution

moved now not at the pace of a random mutation once a millennium, but with the speed of the

starships of the Terran Fleet.

"Hey Captain!"

Davidson turned, only a microsecond late in his reaction, but that was late enough to annoy him.

There was something about this damn planet, its

gold sunlight and hazy sky, its mild winds smelling of leaf mold and pollen, something that made

you daydream. You mooched along thinking about conquistadors, and destiny and stuff, till you were

acting as thick and slow as a creechie. "Morning, Ok!" he said crisply to the logging foreman.

- Black and tough as wire rope, Oknanawi Nabo was Kee's physical opposite, but he had the same

worried look. "You got half a minute?"

"Sure. What's eating you, Ok?"

"The little bastards."

They leaned their backsides on a split rail fence. Davidson lit his first reefer of the day.

Sunlight, smoke-blued, slanted warm across the air. The forest behind camp, a quarter-mile-wide

uncut strip, was full of the faint, ceaseless, cracking, chuckling, stirring, whirring, silvery

noises that woods in the morning are full of. It might have been Idaho in 1950, this clearing. Or

Kentucky in 1830. Or Gaul in 50 B.C. "Te-whet," said a distant bird.

"I'd like to get rid of 'em, Captain."

"The creechies? How d'you mean, Ok?"

"Just let 'em go. Ican'tget enough work out of 'em in the mill to make up for their keep. Or for

their being such a damn headache. They just don't work."

' "ITiey do if you know how to make 'em. They built the camp."

Oknanawi's obsidian face was dour. "Well, you got the touch with 'em, I guess. I don't.'' He

paused. "In that Applied History course I took in training for Far-out, it said that slavery never

worked. It was uneconomical."

"Right, but this isn't slavery, Ok baby. Slaves are humans. When you raise cows, you call that

slavery? No. And it works."

Impassive, the foreman nodded; but he said, "They're too little. I tried starving the sulky ones.

They just sit and starve."

* "Hiey're little, all right, but don't let 'em fool you, Ok. They're tough; they've got terrific

endurance; and they don't feel pain like humans. That's the part you forget, Ok. You think hitting

one is like hitting a kid, sort of. Believe me, it's more like hitting a robot for all they feel

it. 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. They're all like

that. Probably they've got more primitive nerves than humans do. Like fish. I'll tell you a weird

one about that. When I was in Central, before I came up here, one of the tame males jumped me

once. I know they'll tell you they never fight, but this one went spla, right off his nut, and

lucky he wasn't armed or he'd have killed me. 1 had to damn near kill him before he'd even let go.

And he kept coming back. It was incredible the beating he took and never even felt it. Like some

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beetle you have to keep stepping on because it doesn't know it's been squashed already. Look at

this." Davidson bent down his close-cropped head to show a

gnarled lump behind one ear. "That was damn near a concussion. And he did it after I'd broken his

arm and pounded his face into cranberry sauce. He just kept coming back and coming back. The thing

is, Ok, the creechies are lazy, they're dumb, they're treacherous, and they don't feel pain.

You've got to be tough with 'em, and stay tough with 'em."

"They- aren't worth the trouble, Captain. Damn sulky little green bastards, they won't fight,

won't work, won'tnothing. Except give me the pip.'* There was a geniality in Oknanawi's grumbling

which did not conceal the stubbornness beneath. He wouldn't beat up creechies because they were so

much smaller; mat was clear hi his mind, and clear now to Davidson, who at once accepted it. He

knew how to handle his men. "Look, Ok. Try this. Pick out the ringleaders and tell 'em you're

going to give mem a shot of hallucinogen. Mesc, lice, any one, they don't know one from the other.

But they're scared of them. Don't overwork it, and it'll work. I can guarantee."

"Why are they scared of hallies?" the foreman asked curiously.

"How do I know? Why are women scared of rats? Don't look for good sense from women or creechies,

Ok! Speaking of which I'm on the way to Central mis morning, shall I put the finger on a Collie

Girl for you?"

"Just keep the finger off a few till I get my leave." OK said grinning. A group of creechies

passed, carrying a long 12 x 12 beam for the Rec Room being built down by the river. Slow,

shambling little figures, they worried the big beam along like a lot of ants with a dead

caterpillar, sullen and inept. Oknanawi watched them and said, "Fact is, Captain, they give me the

creeps."

That was queer, coming from a tough, quiet guy like Ok.

"Well, I agree with you, actually, Ok, mat they're not worth the trouble, or the risk. If mat fan

Lyubov wasn't around and the Colonel wasn't so stuck on following the Code, I think we might just

clean out the areas we settle, instead of this Voluntary Labor routine. TTiey're going to get

rubbed out sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner. It's just how things happen to be.

Primitive races always have to give way to civilised ones. Or be assimilated. But we sure as hell

can't assimilate a lot of green monkeys. And like you say, they're just bright enough that they'll

never be quite trustworthy. Like those big monkeys used to live in Africa, what were they called?"

"Gorillas?"

"Right. We'll get on better without creechies here, just like we get on better without gorillas in

Africa. They're in our way. . . . But Daddy Ding-Dong he say use creechie-labor, so we use

creechie-labor. For a while. Right? See you tonight, Ok."

"Right, Captain."

Davidson checked out the hopper from Smith Camp HQ: a pine-plank 4-meter cube, two desks,

a watercooler, Lt. Birno repairing a watkytalky. "Don't let the camp bum down, Birno."

"Bring me back a Collie, Cap. Blonde. 34-22-36."

"Christ, is mat all?"

"I like *em neat, not floppy, see." Birno expressively outlined his preference in the air.

Grinning, Davidson went on up to the hangar. As he brought the helicopter back over camp he looked

down at it: kid's blocks, sketch-tines of paths, long stump-stubbled clearings, all shrinking as

the machine rose and he saw the green of the uncut forests of the great island, and beyond that

dark green the pale green of the sea going on and on. Now Smith Camp looked like a yellow spot, a

fleck on a vast green tapestry.

He crossed Smith Straits and the wooded, deep-folded ranges of north Central Island, and came down

by noon in Centralville. It looked like a city, at least after three months in the woods; there

were real streets, real buildings, it had been mere since the Colony began four years ago. 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. The ship wasn't a big one but it looked so big, here. And it was

only a launch, a lander, a ship's boat; the NAFAL ship of the line, Shackle ton, was half a

million kilos up, in orbit. The launch was just a hint, just a fingertip of the hugeness, the

power, the golden

precision and grandeur of the star-bridging technology of Earth.

That was why tears came to Davidson's eyes for a second at the sight of the ship from home. He

wasn't ashamed of it. He was a patriotic man, it just happened to be the way he was made.

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Soon enough, walking down those frontier-town streets with their wide vistas of nothing much at

each end, he began to smile. For the, women were there, all right, and you could tell they were

fresh ones. They mostly had long tight skirts and big shoes like goloshes, red or purple or gold,

and gold or silver frilly shirts. No more nipplepeeps. Fashions had changed; too bad. They all

wore their hair piled up high, it must be sprayed with that glue stuff they used. Ugly as hell,

but it was the sort of thing only women would do to their hair, and so it was provocative.,

Davidson grinned at a chesty little euraf with more oak than head; he got no smile, but a wag of

the retreating hips that said plainly, Follow follow follow me. But he didn't. Not yet. He went to

Central HQ: quickstone and plastiplate Standard Issue, 40 offices, 10 watercoolers and a basement

arsenal, and checked in with New Tahiti Central Colonial Administration Command. He met a couple

of the launch-crew, put in a request for a new semirobo bark-stripper at Forestry, and got his old

pal Juju Sereng to meet him at the Luau Bar at fourteen hundred.

He got to the bar an hour early to stock up on a little food before the drinking began. Lyubov was

there, sitting with a couple of guys in Fleet uniform, some kind of speshes that had come down on

the Shackle ton'& launch. Davidson didn't have a high regard for the Navy, a lot of fancy

sunhoppers who left the dirty, muddy, dangerous on-planet work to the Army; but brass was brass,

and anyhow it was funny to see Lyubov acting chummy with anybody in uniform. He was talking,

waving his hands around the way be did. Just in passing Davidson tapped his shoulder and said,

"Hi, Raj old pal, how's tricks?" He went on without waiting for the scowl, though he hated to miss

it. It was really funny the way Lyubov hated him. Probably the guy was effeminate like a lot of

intellectuals, and resented David-son's virility. Anyhow Davidson wasn't going to waste any time

hating Lyubov, he wasn't worth the trouble.

The Luau served a first-rate venison steak. What would they say on old Earth if they saw one man

eating a kilogram of meat at one meal? Poor damn soybeansuckers! Then Juju arrived with— as

Davidson had confidently expected—the pick of the new Collie Girls: two fruity beauties, not

Brides, but Recreation Staff. Oh the old Colonial Administration sometimes came through! It was a

long, hot afternoon.

Flying back to camp he crossed Smith Straits level with the sun that lay on top of a great gold

bed of haze over the sea. He sang as he lolled in the pilot's seat. Smith Land came in sight hazy,

and there was smoke over the camp, a dark

smudge as if oil had got into the waste-burner, He couldn't even make out the buildings through

it. It was only as he dropped down to the landing-field that be saw the charred jet, the wrecked

hoppers, the burned-out hangar.

He pulled the hopper up again and flew back over the camp, so low that he might have hit the high

cone of the burner, the only thing left sticking up. The rest was gone, mill, furnace,

lumberyards, HQ, huts, barracks, creechie compound, everything. Black hulks and wrecks, still

smoking. But it hadn't been a forest fire. The forest stood there, green, next to the ruins. David-

son swung back round to the field, set down and lit out looking for the motorbike, but it too was

a black wreck along with the stinking, smoldering ruins of the hangar and the machinery. He loped

down the path to camp. As he passed what had been the radio hut, his mind snapped back into gear.

Without hesitating for even a stride he changed course, off the path, behind the gutted shack.

There he stopped. He listened.

There was nobody. It was all silent. 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.

Davidson's brain was super-clear and active, now, as he crouched behind the radio shack. There

were two possibilities. One: an attack from

another camp. Some officer on King or New Java had gone spla and was trying a coup de plane te.

Two: an attack from off-planet. He s£w the golden tower on the space-dock at Central. But if the

Shackleton had gone privateer why would she start by rubbing out a small camp, instead of taking

over Centralville? No, it must be invasion, aliens. Some unknown race, or maybe the Cetians or the

Hainish had decided to move in on Earth's colonies. He'd never trusted those damned smart

humanoids. This must have been done with a heatbomb. The invading force, with jets, air-cars,

nukes, could easily be hidden on an island or reef anywhere in the SW Quartersphere. He must get

back to his hopper and send out the alarm, then try a look around, reconnoiter, so he could tell

HQ his assessment of the actual situation. He was just straightening up when he heard the voices.

Not human voices. High, soft, gabble-gobble. Aliens.

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Ducking on hands and knees behind the shack's plastic roof, which lay on the ground deformed by

heat into a batwing shape, he held still and listened.

Four creechies walked by a few yards from him, on the path. They were wild creechies, naked except

for loose leather belts on which knives and pouches hung. None wore the shorts and leather collar

supplied to tame creechies. The Volunteers in the compound must have been incinerated along with

the humans.

They stopped a little way past his hiding place, talking their slow gabble-gobble, and Davidson

held his breath. He didn't want them to spot him. What the devil were creechies doing here? They

could only be serving as spies and scouts for the invaders.

One pointed south as it talked, and turned, so that Davidson saw its face. And he recognized it.

Creechies all looked alike, but this one was different. He had written his own signature all over

that face, less man a year ago. 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?

Davidson*s mind raced, clicked; reactions fast as always, he stood up, sudden, tall, easy, gun in

hand. "You creechies. Stop. Stay-put. No moving!"

His voice cracked out like a whiplash. The four little green creatures did not move. The one with

the smashed-in face looked at him across the black rubble with huge, blank eyes that had no light

in them.

"Answer now. This fire, who start it?"

No answer.

"Answer now: hurry-up-quick! No answer, then I burn-up first one, then one, then one, see? This

fire, who start it?"

"We burned the camp, Captain Davidson," said the one from Central, in a queer soft voice that

reminded Davidson of some human. "The humans are all dead."

"You burned it, what do you mean?"

He could not recall Scarf ace's name for some reason.

' 'There were two hundred humans here. Ninety slaves of my people. Nine hundred of my people came

out of the forest. First we killed the humans in the place in the forest where they were cutting

trees, then we killed those in this place, while the houses were burning. I had thought you were

killed. I am glad to see you, Captain Davidson."

It was all crazy, and of course a lie. They couldn't have killed all of mem, Ok, Birno, Van Sten,

all the rest, two hundred men, some of them would have got out. All the creechies had was bows and

arrows. Anyway the creechies couldn't have done this. Creechies didn't fight, didn't kill, didn't

have wars. They were intraspecies nonag-gressive, that meant sitting ducks. They didn't fight

back. They sure as hell didn't massacre two hundred men at a swipe. It was crazy. The silence, the

faint stink of burning in the long, warm evening light, the pale-green faces with unmoving eyes

that watched him, it all added up to nothing, to a crazy bad dream, a nightmare.

"Who did this for you?"

"Nine hundred of my people," Scarf ace said in that damned fake-human voice.

* *No, not that. Who else? Who were you acting for? Who told you what to do?"

"My wife did."

Davidson saw then the telltale tension of the creature's stance, yet it sprang at him so lithe and

oblique that his shot missed, burning an arm or shoulder instead of smack between the eyes. And

the creechie was on him, half his size and weight yet knocking him right off balance by its

onslaught, for he had been relying on the gun and not expecting attack. Hie thing's arms were

thin, tough, coarse-furred in his grip, and as he struggled with it, it sang.

He was down on his back, pinned down, disarmed. Four green muzzles looked down at him. The

scarfaced one was still singing, a breathless gabble, but with a tune to it. The other three

listened, their white teeth showing in grins. He had never seen a creechie smile. He had never

looked up into a creechie's face from below. Always down, from above. From on top. He tried not to

struggle, for at the moment it was wasted effort. Little as they were, they outnumbered him, and

Scarf ace had his gun. He must wait. But there was a sickness in him, a nausea mat made his body

twitch and strain against his will. Hie small hands held him down effortlessly, the small green

faces bobbed over him grinning.

Scarface ended bis song. He knelt on David-son's chest, a knife in one hand, Davidson's gun in the

other.

"You can't sing, Captain Davidson, is that right? Well, then, you may run to your hopper, and fly

away, and tell the Colonel in Central mat this place is burned and the humans are all killed."

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Blood, the same startling red as human blood,

clotted the fur of the creechie's right arm, and the knife shook in the green paw. The sharp,

scarred face looked (town into Davidson's from very close, and he could see now the queer light

that burned way down in the charcoal-dark eyes. The voice was still soft and quiet.

They let him go.

He got up cautiously, still dizzy from the fall Scarface had given him. The creechies stood well

away from him now, knowing his reach was twice theirs; but Scarface wasn't the only one armed,

there was a second gun pointing at his guts. That was Ben holding the gun. His own creechie Ben,

the little grey mangy bastard, looking stupid as always but holding a gun.

It's hard to turn your back on two pointing guns, but Davidson did it and started walking towards

the field.

A voice behind him said some creechie word, shrill and loud. Another said, "Hurry-up-quick!" and

there was a queer noise like birds twittering that must be creechie laughter. A shot clapped and

whined on the road right by him. Christ, it wasn't fair, they had the guns and he wasn't armed. He

began to run. He could outrun any creechie. They didn't know how to shoot a gun.

"Run," said the quiet voice far behind him. That was Scarface. Selver, that was his name. Sam,

they'd called him, till Lyubov stopped Davidson from giving him what he deserved and made a pet

out of him, then they'd called him Selver. Christ, what was all this, it was a night-

mare. He ran. The blood thundered in his ears. He ran through the golden, smoky evening. There was

a body by the path, he hadn't even noticed it coming. It wasn't burned, it looked like a white

balloon with the air gone out. It had staring blue eyes. They didn't dare kin him, Davidson. They

hadn't shot at him again. It was impossible. They couldn't kill him. There was the hopper, safe

and shining, and he lunged into the seat and had her up before the creechies could try anything.

His hands shook, but not much, just shock. They couldn't kill nun. He circled the hill and then

came back fast and low, looking for the four creechies. But nothing moved in the streaky rubble of

the camp.

There had been a camp there this morning. Two-hundred men. There had been four creechies there.

just now. He hadn't dreamed all mis. They couldn't just disappear. They were there, hiding. He

opened up the machinegun in the hopper's nose and raked the burned ground, shot holes in the green

leaves of the forest, strafed the burned bones and cold bodies of his men and the wrecked

machinery and the rotting white stumps, returning again and again until the ammo was gone and the

gun's spasms stopped short.

Davidson's hands were steady now, his body felt appeased, and he knew he wasn't caught in any

dream. He headed back over the Straits, to take the news to Centralville. As he flew he could feel

his face relax into its usual calm lines. They couldn't blame the disaster on him, for be hadn't

even been there. Maybe they'd see that it was significant that the creechies had struck while he

Was gone, knowing they'd fail if he was there to organize the defense. And there was one good

thing would come out of this. They'd do like they should have done to start with, and clean up the

planet for human occupation. 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! They'd go in for rat-

extermination for a while, now; and maybe, just maybe, they'd hand that little job over to him! At

that thought he could have smiled. But he kept 'his face calm.

The sea under him was greyish with twilight, and ahead of him lay the island hills, the deep-

folded, many-streamed, many-leaved forests in the dusk.

Two

ALL the colors of rust and sunset, brown-reds and pale greens, changed ceaselessly in the long

leaves as the wind blew. The roots of the cooper willows, thick and ridged, were moss-green down

by the running water, which like the wind moved slowly with many soft eddies and seeming pauses,

held back by rocks, roots, hanging and fallen leaves. No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the

forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and

root, the shadowy, the complex. Little paths ran under the branches, around the boles, over the

roots; they did not go straight, but yielded to every obstacle, devious as nerves. The ground was

not dry and solid but damp and rather springy, product of the collaboration of living things with

the long, elaborate death of leaves and trees; and from that rich graveyard grew ninety-foot

trees, and tiny mushrooms that sprouted in circles half an inch across. The smell of the air

was subtle, various, and sweet. The view was never long, unless looking up through the branches

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you caught sight of the stars. Nothing was pure, dry, arid, plain. Revelation was lacking. There

was no seeing everything at once: no certainty. The colors of rust and sunset kept changing in the

hanging leaves of the copper willows, and you could not say even whether the leaves of the willows

were brownish-red, or reddish-green, or green.

Selver came up a path beside the water, going slowly and often stumbling on the willow roots. He

saw an old man dreaming, and stopped. The old man looked at him through the long willow-leaves and

saw him in his dreams.

"May I come to your Lodge, my Lord Dreamer? I've come a long way."

The old man sat still. Presently Selver squatted down on his heels just off the path, beside the

stream. His head drooped down, for he was worn out and had to sleep. He had been walking five

days.

"Are you of the dream-time or of the world-time?*' the old man asked at last.

'-'Of the world-time."

* 'Come along with me men.f' The old man got up promptly and led Selver up the wandering path out

of the willow grove into dryer, darker regions of oak and thorn. "Itookyouforagod,"hesaid, going a

pace ahead. "And it seemed to me I had seen you before, perhaps in dream."

"Not in the world-time. I come from Sornol, I have never been here before."

"This town is Cadast. I am Coro Mena. Of the Whitethorn."

"Selver is my name. Of the Ash."

"There are Ash people among us, both men and women. Also your marriage-clans, Birch and Holly; we

have no women of the Apple. But you don't come looking for a wife, do you?"

"My wife is dead," Selver said.

They came to the Men's Lodge, on high ground in a stand of young oaks. They stooped and crawled

through the tunnel-entrance. Inside, in

•the firelight, the old man stood up, but Selver stayed crouching on hands and knees, unable to

rise. Now that help and comfort was at hand his body, which he had forced too far, would not go

farther. It lay down and the eyes closed; and Selver slipped, with relief and gratitude, into the

great darkness.

The men of the Lodge of Cadast looked after him, and their healer came to tend the wound in his

right arm. In the night Coro Mena and the healer Torber sat by the fire. Most of the other men

were with their wives that night; there were only a couple of young prentice-dreamers over on the

benches, and they had both gone fast asleep.

* *I don't know what would give a man such scars as he has on his face, "said the healer, "and

much less, such a wound as that in his arm. A very queer wound."

"It's a queer engine he wore on his belt/* said Coro Mena.

"I saw it and didn't see it."

"I put it under his bench. It looks like polished iron, but not like the handiwork of men."

"He comes from Somol, he said to you/*

They were both silent a while. 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. Their dry scaly limbs were swathed in cloths; their eyes were

little and light, like tin beads. Behind them crawled huge moving things made of polished iron.

The trees fell down in front of them.

Out from among the falling trees a man ran, crying aloud, with blood on his mouth. The path he ran

on was the doorpath of the Lodge of Cadast.

"Well, mere's little doubt of it," Coro Mena said, sliding out of the dream. "He came oversea

straight from Sornol, or else came afoot from the coast of Kelme Deva on our own land. Hie giants

are in both those places, travellers say."

"Will they follow him," said Torber; neither answered the question, which was no question but a

statement of possibility.

"You saw the giants once, Coro?"

"Once," the old man said.

He dreamed; sometimes, being very old and not so strong as he had been, he slipped off to sleep

for a while. Day broke, noon passed. Out-

side the Lodge a hunting-party went out, children chirped, women talked in voices like running

water. A dryer voice called Coro Mena from the door. He crawled out into the evening sunlight. His

sister stood outside, sniffing the aromatic wind with pleasure, but looking stem all the same.

"Has the stranger waked up, Coro?"

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"Not yet. Torber's looking after him."

"We must hear his story.'*

"No doubt he'll wake soon.*'

Ebor Dendep frowned. Head woman of Cadast, she was anxious for her people; but she did not want to

ask that a hurt man be disturbed, nor to offend the Dreamers by insisting on her right to enter

their Lodge. "Can'tyouwakehim,Coro?" she asked at last. "What if he is . . . being pursued?"

He could not run his sister's emotions on the same rein with his own, yet he felt them; her

anxiety bit him. "If Torber permits, I will," he said.

* 'Try to learn his news, quickly. I wish he was a woman and would talk sense. . . ."

The stranger had roused himself, and lay feverish in the half dark of the Lodge. The unreined

dreams of illness moved in his eyes. He sat up, however, and spoke with control. As he listened

Coro Mena's bones seemed to shrink within him trying to hide from this terrible story, this new

thing.

"I was Selver Thele, when I lived in Eshreth in Soruol. My city was destroyed by the yumens

when they cut down the trees in that region. I was one of those made to serve them, with my wife

Thele. She was raped by one of them and died. I attacked the yumen that killed her. He would have

killed me then, but another of them saved me and set me free. I left Sornol, where no town is safe

from the yumens now, and came here to the North Isle, and lived on the coast of Kelme Deva in the

Red Groves. TTiere presently the yumens came and began to cut down the world. They destroyed a

city there, Penle. They caught a hundred of the men and women and made them serve them, and live

hi the pen. I was not caught. I lived with others who had escaped from Penle, in the bog-land

north of Kelme Deva. Sometimes at night I went among the people in the yumen's pens. They told me

that one was there. That one whom I had tried to kill. I thought at first to try again; or else to

set the people in the pen free. But all the time I watched the trees fall and saw the world cut

open and left to rot. The men might have escaped, but the women were locked in more safely and

could not, and they were beginning to die. I talked with the people hiding there in the boglands.

We were all very frightened and very angry, and had no way to let our fear and anger free. So at

last after long talking, and long dreaming, and the making of a plan, we went in daylight, and

killed the yumens of Kelme Deva with arrows and hunting-lances, and burned their city and their

engines. We left nothing. But that one had gone away. He

came back alone. I sang over him, and let him

go."

Selver fell silent.

"Then," Coro Mena whispered.

"Then a flying ship came from Somol, and hunted us in the forest, but found nobody. So they set

fire to the forest; but it rained, and they did little harm. Most of the people freed from the

pens and the others have gone farther norm and east, towards the Holle Hills, for we were afraid

many yumens might come hunting us. I went alone. The yumens know me, you see, they know my face;

and this frightens me, and those I stay with." • "What is your wound?'* Torber asked.

"That one, he shot me with their kind of weapon; but I sang him down and let him go."

"Alone you downed a giant?" said Torber with a fierce grin, wishing to believe.

"Not alone. With three hunters, and with his weapon in my hand—this."

Torber drew back from the thing.

None of them spoke for a while. At last Coro Mena said, "What you tell us is very black, and the

road goes down. Are you a Dreamer of your Lodge?"

"I was. There's no Lodge of Eshreth any more."

"That's all one; we speak the Old Tongue together. Among the willows of Asta you first spoke to me

calling me Lord Dreamer. So I am. Do you dream, 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, Seiver."

"No, it is altogether bad," Seiver said, "there's nothing good left," and he began to shake.

Torber gave him the willow-draught to drink and made him lie down. Coro Mena still had the

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headwoman's question to ask; reluctantly he did so, kneeling by the sick man. "Will the giants,

the yumens you call them, will they follow your trail, Seiver?"

"I left no trail. No one has seen me between Kelme Deva and this place, six days. That's not the

danger." He struggled to sit up again. "Listen, listen. You don't see the danger. How can you see

it? You haven'd 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."

"Lie down—"

"No, I'm not raving, mis is true fact and dream. There were two hundred yumens at Kelme

Deva and they are dead. We killed them. We killed them as if they were not men. So will they not

turn and do the same? They have killed us by ones, now they will kill us as they kill the trees,

by hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds."

"Be still," Torber said. "Such things happen in the fever-dream, Seiver. They do not happen in the

world."

"The world is always new," said Coro Mena, "however old its roots. Seiver, how is it with these

creatures, then? They look like men and talk like men, are they not men?" - "I don't know. 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. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! 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, crosslegged 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. It is changed. You have walked on it and it is

utterly changed. Before this day the thing we had to do was the right thing to do; the way we had

to go was the right way and led us home. Where is our home now? For you've done what

you had to do, and it was not right. You have killed men. I saw mem, five years ago, in the Lemgan

Valley, where they came in a flying ship; I hid and watched the giants, six of them,, and saw them

speak, and look at rocks and plants, and cook food. They are men. But you have lived among them,

tell me, Selver: do they dream?"

"As children do, in sleep.**

"They have no training?"

"No. Sometimes they talk of their dreams, the healers try to use mem in healing, but none of mem

are trained, or have any skill in dreaming. Lyubov, who taught me, understood me when I snowed him

how to dream, and yet even so be called the world-time 'real* and the dream-time, 'unreal,'as if

that were the difference between them,"

"You have done what you had to do," Coro Mena repeated after a silence. His eyes met Selver's,

across shadows. The desperate tension lessened in Selver's face; his scarred mouth relaxed, and

belay back without saying more. In a little while he was asleep.

"He's a god," Coro Mena said.

Torber nodded, accepting the old man's judgment almost with relief.

"But not like the others. Not like the Pursuer, nor the Friend who has no face, nor the Aspen-leaf

Woman who walks in the forest of dreams. He is not the Gatekeeper, nor the Snake. Nor the

Lyreplayer nor the Carver nor the Hunter, though

he comes in the world-time like them. 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."

The headwoman listened to Coro Mena's reports and prophecies, and acted. She put the town of

Cadast on alert, making sure that each family was ready to move out, with some food packed, and

litters ready for the old and ill. She sent young women scouting south and east for news of the

yumens. She kept one armed hunting-group always around town, though the others went out as usual

every night. And when Selver grew stronger she insisted that he come out of the Lodge and tell his

story: how the yumens killed and enslaved people in Sornol, and cut down the forests; how the

people of Kelme Deva had killed the yumens. 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

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