The Word for World is Forest (8 page)

“Captain Lyubov,” said the old Colonel, “such submissions are not properly submitted by staff specialist officers to officers of other branches of the service but should rest on the judgment of the senior officers of the Colony, and I cannot tolerate any further such attempts as this to give advice without previous clearance.”

Caught off guard by his own outburst, Lyubov apologized and tried to look calm. If only he didn’t lose his temper, if his voice didn’t go weak and husky, if he had poise. . . .

The Colonel went on. “It appears to us that you made some serious erroneous judgments concerning the peacefulness and non-aggressiveness of the natives here, and because we counted on this specialist description of them as non-aggressive is why we left ourselves open to this terrible tragedy at Smith Camp, Captain Lyubov. So I
think we have to wait until some other specialits in hilfs have had time to study them, because evidently your theories were basically erroneous to some extent.”

Lyubov sat and took it. Let the men from the ship see them all passing the blame around like a hot brick: all the better. The more dissension they showed, the likelier were these Emissaries to have them checked and watched over. And he was to blame; he had been wrong. To hell with my self-respect so long as the forest people get a chance, Lyubov thought, and so strong a sense of his own humiliation and self-sacrifice came over him that tears rose to his eyes.

He was aware that Davidson was watching him.

He sat up stiff, the blood hot in his face, his temples drumming. He would not be sneered at by that bastard Davidson. Couldn’t Or and Lepennon see what kind of man Davidson was, and how much power he had here, while Lyubov’s powers, called “advisory,” were simply derisory? If the colonists were left to go on with no check on them but a super-radio, the Smith Camp massacre would almost certainly become the excuse for systematic aggression against the natives. Bacteriological extermination, most likely. The
Shackleton
would come back in three and a half or four years to “New Tahiti,” and find a thriving Terran colony, and no more Creechie Problem. None at all. Pity about the plague, we took all precautions required by
the Code, but it must have been some kind of mutation, they had no natural resistance, but we did manage to save a group of them by transporting them to the New Falkland Isles in the southern hemisphere and they’re doing fine there, all sixty-two of them. . . .

The conference did not last much longer. When it ended he stood up and leaned across the table to Lepennon. “You must tell the League to do something to save the forests, the forest people,” he said almost inaudibly, his throat constricted, “you must, please, you must.”

The Hainishman met his eyes; his gaze was reserved, kindly, and deep as a well. He said nothing.

It was unbelievable. They’d all gone insane. This damned alien world had sent them all right round the bend, into byebye dreamland, along with the creechies. He still wouldn’t believe what he’d seen at that ‘conference’ and the briefing after it, if he saw it all over again on film. A Starfleet ship’s commander bootlicking two humanoids. Engineers and techs cooing and ooing over a fancy radio presented to them by a Hairy Cetian with a lot of sneering and boasting, as if ICD’s hadn’t been predicted by Terran science years ago! The humanoids had stolen the
idea, implemented it, and called it an ‘ansible’ so nobody would realize it was just an ICD. But the worst part of it had been the conference, with that psycho Lyubov raving and crying, and Colonel Dongh letting him do it, letting him insult Davidson and HQ staff and the whole Colony; and all the time the two aliens sitting and grinning, the little gray ape and the big white fairy, sneering at humans.

It had been pretty bad. It hadn’t got any better since the
Shackleton
left. He didn’t mind being sent down to New Java Camp under Major Muhamed. The Colonel had to discipline him; old Ding Dong might actually be very happy about that fire-raid he’d pulled in reprisal on Smith Island, but the raid had been a breach of discipline and he had to reprimand Davidson. All right, rules of the game. But what wasn’t in the rules was this stuff coming over that overgrown TV set they called the ansible—their new little tin god at HQ.

Orders from the Bureau of Colonial Administration in Karachi:
Restrict Terran-Athshean contact to occasions arranged by Athsheans
. In other words you couldn’t go into a creechie warren and round up a work-force any more.
Employment of volunteer labor is not advised; employment of forced labor is forbidden
. More of same. How the hell were they supposed to get the work done? Did Earth want this wood or didn’t it? They were still sending the
robot cargo ships to New Tahiti, weren’t they, four a year, each carrying about 30 million new-dollars worth of prime lumber back to Mother Earth. Sure the Development people wanted those millions. They were businessmen. These messages weren’t coming from them, any fool could see that.

The colonial status of World 41
—why didn’t they call it New Tahiti any more?—is
under consideration. Until decision is reached colonists should observe extreme caution in all dealings with native inhabitants. . . . The use of weapons of any kind except small side-arms carried in self-defense is absolutely forbidden
—just as on Earth, except that there a man couldn’t even carry side-arms any more. But what the hell was the use coming twenty-seven lightyears to a frontier world and then get told no guns, no firejelly, no bugbombs, no, no, just sit like nice little boys and let the creechies come spit in your faces and sing songs at you and then stick a knife in your guts and burn down your camp, but don’t you hurt the cute little green fellers, no sir!

A policy of avoidance is strongly advised; a policy of aggression or retaliation is strictly forbidden.

That was the gist of all the messages actually, and any fool could tell that that wasn’t the Colonial Administration talking. They couldn’t have changed that much in thirty years. They were practical, realistic men who knew what
life was like on frontier planets. 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. The engineers said they could have spotted that; maybe so. In that case the thing did communicate instantaneously with another world. But that world wasn’t Earth. Not by a long long shot! There weren’t any men typing the answers onto the other end of that little trick: they were aliens, humanoids. Probably Cetians, for the machine was Cetian-made, and they were a smart bunch of devils. They were the kind that might make a real bid for interstellar supremacy. The Hainish would be in the conspiracy with them, of course; all that bleeding-heart stuff in the so-called directives had a Hainish sound to it. What the long-term objective of the aliens was, was hard to guess from here; it probably involved weakening the Terran Government by tying it up in this ‘league of worlds’ business, until the aliens were strong enough to make an armed takeover. But their plan for New Tahiti was easy to see. They’d let the creechies wipe out the humans for them. Just tie the humans’ hands with a lot of fake ‘ansible’ directives and let the slaughter begin. Humanoids help humanoids: rats help rats.

And Colonel Dongh had swallowed it. He intended to obey orders. He had actually said that to Davidson. “I
intend to obey my orders from Terra-HQ, and by God, Don, you’ll obey my orders the same way, and in New Java you’ll obey Major Muhamed’s orders there.” He was stupid, old Ding Dong, but he liked Davidson, and Davidson liked him. If it meant betraying the human race to an alien conspiracy then he couldn’t obey his orders, but he still felt sorry for the old soldier. A fool, but a loyal and brave one. Not a born traitor like that whining, tattling prig Lyubov. 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. If he could save the men and women of New Tahiti, he would; if he couldn’t, he’d make a damn good try; and that was all there was to it, actually.

The women, now, that rankled. They’d pulled out the 10 Collies who’d been in New Java and none of the new ones were being sent out from Centralville. “Not safe yet,” HQ bleated. Pretty rough on the three outpost camps. What did they expect the outposters to do when it was hands off the she-creechies, and all the she-humans were for the lucky bastards at Central? It was going to cause terrific resentment. But it couldn’t last long, the whole
situation was too crazy to be stable. If they didn’t start easing back to normal now that
Shackleton
was gone, then Captain D. Davidson would just have to do a little extra work to get things headed back toward normalcy.

The morning of the day he left Central, they had let loose the whole creechie work-force. Made a big noble speech in pidgin, opened the compound gates, and let out every single tame creechie, carriers, diggers, cooks, dustmen, houseboys, maids, the lot. Not one had stayed. Some of them had been with their masters ever since the start of the colony, four E-years ago. But they had no loyalty. A dog, a chimp would have hung around. These things weren’t even that highly developed, they were just about like snakes or rats, just smart enough to turn around and bite you as soon as you let ’em out of the cage. Ding Dong was spla, letting all those creechies loose right in the vicinity. Dumping them on Dump Island and letting them starve would have been actually the best final solution. But Dongh was still panicked by that pair of humanoids and their talky-box. So if the wild creechies on Central were planning to imitate the Smith Camp atrocity, they now had lots of real handy new recruits, who knew the layout of the whole town, the routines, where the arsenal was, where guards were posted, and the rest.
If Centralville got burned down, HQ could thank themselves. It would be what they deserved, actually. For letting traitors dupe them, for listening to humanoids and ignoring the advice of men who really knew what the creechies were like.

None of those guys at HQ had come back to camp and found ashes and wreckage and burned bodies, like he had. And Ok’s body, out where they’d slaughtered the logging crew, it had had an arrow sticking out of each eye like some sort of weird insect with antennae sticking out feeling the air, Christ, he kept seeing that.

One thing anyhow, whatever the phony ‘directives’ said, the boys at Central wouldn’t be stuck with trying to use ‘small side-arms’ for self-defense. They had fire throwers and machine guns; the 16 little hoppers had machine guns and were useful for dropping firejelly cans from; the five big hoppers had full armament. But they wouldn’t need the big stuff. Just take up a hopper over one of the deforested areas and catch a mess of creechies there, with their damned bows and arrows, and start dropping firejelly cans and watch them run around and burn. It would be all right. It made his belly churn a little to imagine it, just like when he thought about making a woman, or whenever he remembered about when that Sam creechie had attacked him and he had smashed in his whole face with four blows one right after the other. It was eidetic
memory plus a more vivid imagination than most men had, no credit due, just happened to be the way he was made.

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.

New Java was the southernmost of the five big lands, just north of the equator, and so was hotter than Central or Smith which were just about perfect climate-wise. Hotter and a lot wetter. It rained all the time in the wet seasons anywhere on New Tahiti, but in the northern lands it was a kind of quiet fine rain that went on and on and never really got you wet or cold. Down here it came in buckets, and there was a monsoon-type storm that you couldn’t even walk in, let alone work in. Only a solid roof kept the rain off you, or else the forest. The damn forest was so thick it kept out the storms. You’d get wet from all the dripping off the leaves, of course, but if you were really inside the forest during one of those monsoons you’d hardly notice the wind was blowing; then you came out in the open and wham! got knocked off your feet by the wind and slobbered all over with the red liquid mud that
the rain turned the cleared ground into, and you couldn’t duck back into the forest quick enough; and inside the forest it was dark, and hot, and easy to get lost.

Then the C.O., Major Muhamed, was a sticky bastard. Everything at N. J. was done by the book: the logging all in kilo-strips, the fiberweed crap planted in the logged strips, leave to Central granted in strictly non-preferential rotation, hallucinogens rationed and their use on duty punished, and so on and so on. However, one good thing about Muhamed was he wasn’t always radioing Central. New Java was his camp, and he ran it his way. He didn’t like orders from HQ. He obeyed them all right, he’d let the creechies go, and locked up all the guns except little popgun pistols, as soon as the orders came. But he didn’t go looking for orders, or for advice. Not from Central or anybody else. He was a self-righteous type: knew he was right. That was his big fault.

When he was on Dongh’s staff at HQ Davidson had had occasion sometimes to see the officers’ records. His unusual memory held on to such things, and he could recall for instance that Muhamed’s IQ was 107. Whereas his own happened to be 118. There was a difference of 11 points; but of course he couldn’t say that to old Moo, and Moo couldn’t see it, and so there was no way to get him to listen. He thought he knew better than Davidson, and that was that.