The Word for World is Forest (7 page)

“Captain Lyubov is expressing his personal opinions and theories,” said Colonel Dongh, “which I should state I consider possibly to be erroneous, and he and I have discussed this type of thing previously, although the present
context is unsuitable. We do not employ slaves, sir. Some of the natives serve a useful role in our community. The Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps is a part of all but the temporary camps here. We have very limited personnel to accomplish our tasks here and we need workers and use all we can get, but on any kind of basis that could be called a slavery basis, certainly not.”

Lepennon was about to speak, but deferred to the Cetian, who said only, “How many of each race?”

Gosse replied: “2641 Terrans, now. Lyubov and I estimate the native hilf population very roughly at 3 million.”

“You should have considered these statistics, gentlemen, before you altered the native traditions!” said Or, with a disagreeable but perfectly genuine laugh.

“We are adequately armed and equipped to resist any type of aggression these natives could offer,” said the Colonel. “However there was a general consensus by both the first Exploratory Missions and our own research staff of specialists here headed by Captain Lyubov, giving us to understand that the New Tahitians are a primitive, harmless, peace-loving species. Now this information was obviously erroneous—”

Or interrupted the Colonel. “Obviously! You consider the human species to be primitive, harmless, and peace-loving, Colonel? No. But you knew that the hilfs of this
planet are human? As human as you or I or Lepennon—since we all came from the same, original, Hainish stock?”

“That is the scientific theory, I am aware—”

“Colonel, it is the historic fact.”

“I am not forced to accept it as a fact,” the old Colonel said, getting hot, “and I don’t like opinions stuffed into my own mouth. The fact is that these creechies are a meter tall, they’re covered with green fur, they don’t sleep, and they’re not human beings in my frame of reference!”

“Captain Davidson,” said the Cetian, “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?” He looked about at the purple colonel, the glowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing specialists. Contempt came into his face. “You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.

The Commander of the
Shackleton
at last salvaged words from the gulf of embarrassed silence. “Well, gentlemen, the tragedy at Smith Camp clearly is involved with the entire colony-native relationship, and is not by any means an insignificant or isolated episode. That’s what we had to establish. And this being the case, we can make a certain contribution toward easing your problems
here. The main purpose of our journey was not to drop off a couple of hundred girls here, though I know you’ve been waiting for ’em, but to get to Prestno, which has been having some difficulties, and give the government there an ansible. That is, an ICD transmitter.”

“What?” said Sereng, an engineer. Stares became fixed, all round the table.

“The one we have aboard is an early model, and it cost a planetary annual revenue, roughly. That, of course, was twenty-seven years ago planetary time, when we left Earth. Nowadays they’re making them relatively cheaply; they’re SI on Navy ships; and in the normal course of things a robo or manned ship would be coming out here to give your colony one. As a matter of fact it’s a manned Administration ship, and is on the way, due here in 9.4 E-years if I recall the figure.”

“How do you know that?” somebody said, setting it up for Commander Yung, who replied smiling, “By the ansible: the one we have aboard. Mr. Or, your people invented the device, perhaps you’d explain it to those here who are unfamiliar with the terms?”

The Cetian did not unbend. “I shall not attempt to explain the principles of ansible operation to those present,” he said. “Its effect can be stated simply: the instantaneous transmission of a message over any distance. One element must be on a large-mass body, the other can be
anywhere in the cosmos. Since arrival in orbit the
Shackleton
has been in daily communication with Terra, now twenty-seven lightyears distant. The message does not take 54 years for delivery and response, as it does on an electromagnetic device. It takes no time. There is no more time-gap between worlds.”

“As soon as we came out of NAFAL time-dilatation into planetary space-time, here, we rang up home, as you might say,” the soft-voice Commander went on. “And were told what had happened during the twenty-seven years we were traveling. The time-gap for bodies remains, but the information lag does not. As you can see, this is as important to us as an interstellar species, as speech itself was to us earlier in our evolution. It’ll have the same effect: to make a society possible.”

“Mr. Or and I left Earth, twenty-seven years ago, as Legates for our respective governments, Tau II and Hain,” said Lepennon. His voice was still gentle and civil, but the warmth had gone out of it. “When we left, people were talking about the possibility of forming some kind of league among the civilized worlds, now that communication was possible. The League of Worlds now exists. It has existed for eighteen years. Mr. Or and I are now Emissaries of the Council of the League, and so have certain powers and responsibilities we did not have when we left Earth.”

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. Some of the military staff, however, trained to compartmentalize their thinking, specialists in self-defense, would accept it as unhesitatingly as he discarded it. They must believe that anyone claiming a sudden new authority was a liar or conspirator. They were no more constrained than Lyubov, who had been trained to keep his mind open whether he wanted to or not.

“Are we to take all—all this simply on your word, sir?” said Colonel Dongh, with dignity and some pathos; for he, too muddleheaded to compartmentalize neatly, knew that he shouldn’t believe Lepennon and Or and Yung, but did believe them, and was frightened.

“No,” said the Cetian. “That’s done with. A colony like this had to believe what passing ships and outdated radio-messages told them. Now you don’t. You can verify. We are going to give you the ansible destined for Prestno. We have League authority to do so. Received, of course, by ansible. Your colony here is in a bad way. Worse than I thought from your reports. Your reports are very incomplete; censorship or stupidity have been at work. Now, however, you’ll have the ansible, and can talk with your
Terran Administration; you can ask for orders, so you’ll know how to proceed. Given the profound changes that have been occurring in the organization of the Terran Government since we left there, I should recommend that you do so at once. There is no longer any excuse for acting on outdated orders; for ignorance; for irresponsible autonomy.”

Sour a Cetian and, like milk, he stayed sour. Mr. Or was being overbearing, and Commander Yung should shut him up. But could he? How did an “Emissary of the Council of the League of Worlds” rank? Who’s in charge here, thought Lyubov, and he too felt a qualm of fear. His headache had returned as a sense of constriction, a sort of tight headband over the temples.

He looked across the table at Lepennon’s white, long-fingered hands, lying left over right, quiet, on the bare polished wood of the table. The white skin was a defect to Lyubov’s Earth-formed aesthetic taste, but the serenity and strength of those hands 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. . . .

An officer, Benton, was asking Lepennon if he and Or were on this planet as observers for the (he hesitated) League of Worlds, or if they claimed any authority to . . . Lepennon took him up politely: “We are observers here, not empowered to command, only to report. You are still answerable only to your own government on Earth.”

Colonel Dongh said with relief, “Then nothing has essentially changed—”

“You forget the ansible,” Or interrupted. “I’ll instruct you in its operation, Colonel, as soon as this discussion is over. You can then consult with your Colonial Administration.”

“Since your problem here is rather urgent, and since Earth is now a League member and may have changed the Colonial Code somewhat during recent years, Mr. Or’s advice is both proper and timely. We should be very grateful to Mr. Or and Mr. Lepennon for their decision to give this Terran colony the ansible destined for Prestno. It was their decision; I can only applaud it. Now, one more decision remains to be made, and this one I have to make, using your judgment as my guide. If you feel the colony is in imminent peril of further and more massive attacks from the natives, I can keep my ship here for a
week or two as a defense arsenal; I can also evacuate the women. No children yet, right?”

“No, sir,” said Gosse. “482 women, now.”

“Well, I have space for 380 passengers; we might crowd a hundred more in; the extra mass would add a year or so to the trip home, but it could be done. Unfortunately that’s all I can do. We must proceed to Prestno; your nearest neighbor, as you know, 1.8 lightyears distant. We’ll stop here on the way home to Terra, but that’s going to be three and a half more E-years at least. Can you stick it out?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, and others echoed him. “We’ve had warning now and we won’t be caught napping again.”

“Equally,” said the Cetian, “can the native inhabitants stick it out for three and a half Earth-years more?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel. “No,” said Lyubov. He had been watching Davidson’s face, and a kind of panic had taken hold of him.

“Colonel?” said Lepennon, politely.

“We’ve been here four years now and the natives are flourishing. There’s room enough and to spare for all of us, as you can see the planet’s heavily underpopulated and the Administration wouldn’t have cleared it for colonization purposes if that hadn’t been as it is. As for if this
entered anyone’s head, they won’t catch us off guard again, we were erroneously briefed concerning the nature of these natives, but we’re fully armed and able to defend ourselves, but we aren’t planning any reprisals. That is expressly forbidden in the Colonial Code, though I don’t know what new rules this new government may have added on, but we’ll just stick to our own as we have been doing and they definitely negative mass reprisals or genocide. We won’t be sending any messages for help out, after all a colony twenty-seven lightyears from home has come out expecting to be on its own and to in fact be completely self-sufficient, and I don’t see that the ICD really changes that, due to ship and men and material still have to travel at near lightspeed. We’ll just keep on shipping the lumber home, and look out for ourselves. The women are in no danger.”

“Mr. Lyubov?” said Lepennon.

“We’ve been here four years. I don’t know if the native human culture will survive four more. As for the total land ecology, I think Gosse will back me if I say that we’ve irrecoverably wrecked the native life-systems on one large island, have done great damage on this subcontinent Sornol, and if we go on logging at the present rate, may reduce the major habitable lands to desert within ten years. This isn’t the fault of the colony’s HQ or Forestry Bureau; they’ve simply been following a Development Plan
drawn up on Earth without sufficient knowledge of the planet to be exploited, its life-systems, or its native human inhabitants.”

“Mr. Gosse?” said the polite voice.

“Well, Raj, you’re stretching things a bit. There’s no denying that Dump Island, which was overlogged in direct contravention to my recommendations, is a dead loss. If more than a certain percentage of the forest is cut over a certain area, then the fiberweed doesn’t reseed, you see, gentlemen, and the fiberweed root-system is the main soil-binder on clear land; without it the soil goes dusty and drifts off very fast under wind-erosion and the heavy rainfall. But I can’t agree that our basic directives are at fault, so long as they’re scrupulously followed. They were based on careful study of the planet. We’ve succeeded, here on Central, by following the Plan: erosion is minimal, and the cleared soil is highly arable. To log off a forest doesn’t, after all, mean to make a desert—except perhaps from the point of view of a squirrel. We can’t forecast precisely how the native forest life-systems will adapt to a new woodland-prairie-plowland ambiance foreseen in the Development Plan, but we know the chances are good for a large percentage of adaptation and survival.”

“That’s what the Bureau of Land Management said about Alaska during the First Famine,” said Lyubov. His throat had tightened so that his voice came out high and
husky. He had counted on Gosse for support. “How many Sitka spruce have you seen in your lifetime, Gosse? Or snowy owl? or wolf? or Eskimo ? The survival percentage of native Alaskan species in habitat, after 15 years of the Development Program, was .3%. It’s now zero.—A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. 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—”