The Word for World is Forest (14 page)

None of them said anything. They looked down at him. Seven big men, with tan or brown hairless skin, cloth-covered, dark-eyed, grim-faced; twelve small men, green or brownish-green, fur-covered, with the large eyes of the seminocturnal creature, with dreamy faces; between the two groups, Selver, the translator, frail, disfigured, holding
all their destinies in his empty hands. Rain fell softly on the brown earth about them.

“Farewell then,” Selver said, and led his people away.

“They’re not so stupid,” said the headwoman of Berre as she accompanied Selver back to Endtor. “I thought such giants must be stupid, but they saw that you’re a god, I saw it in their faces at the end of the talking. How well you talk that gobble-gubble. Ugly they are, do you think even their children are hairless?”

“That we shall never know, I hope.”

“Ugh, think of nursing a child that wasn’t furry. Like trying to suckle a fish.”

“They are all insane,” said old Tubab, looking deeply distressed. “Lyubov wasn’t like that, when he used to come to Tuntar. He was ignorant, but sensible. But these ones, they argue, and sneer at the old man, and hate each other, like this,” and he contorted his gray-furred face to imitate the expressions of the Terrans, whose words of course he had not been able to follow. “Was that what you said to them, Selver, that they’re mad?”

“I told them that they were ill. But then, they’ve been defeated, and hurt, and locked in that stone cage. After that anyone might be ill and need healing.”

“Who’s to heal them,” said the headwoman of Berre, “their women are all dead. Too bad for them. Poor ugly things—great naked spiders they are, ugh!”

“They are men, men, like us, men,” Selver said, his voice shrill and edged like a knife.

“Oh, my dear lord god, I know it, I only meant they
look
like spiders,” said the old woman, caressing his cheek. “Look here, you people, Selver is worn out with this going back and forth between Endtor and Eshsen, let’s sit down and rest a bit.”

“Not here,” Selver said. They were still in the Cut Lands, among stumps and grassy slopes, under the bare sky. “When we come under the trees . . .” He stumbled, and those who were not gods helped him to walk along the road.

Davidson found a good use for Major Muhamed’s tape recorder. Somebody had to make a record of events on New Tahiti, a history of the crucifixion of the Terran Colony. So that when the ships came from Mother Earth they could learn the truth. So that future generations could learn how much treachery and cowardice and folly humans were capable of, and how much courage against all odds. During his free moments—not much more than moments since he had assumed command—he recorded the whole story of the Smith Camp Massacre, and
brought the record up to date for New Java, and for King and Central also, as well as he could with the garbled hysterical stuff that was all he got by way of news from Central HQ.

Exactly what had happened there nobody would ever know, except the creechies, for the humans were trying to cover up their own betrayals and mistakes. The outlines were clear, though. An organized bunch of creechies, led by Selver, had been let into the Arsenal and the Hangars, and turned loose with dynamite, grenades, guns, and flamethrowers to totally destruct the city and slaughter the humans. It was an inside job, the fact that HQ was the first place blown up proved that. Lyubov of course had been in on it, and his little green buddies had proved just as grateful as you might expect, and cut his throat like the others. At least, Gosse and Benton claimed to have seen him dead the morning after the massacre. But could you believe any of them, actually? You could assume that any human left alive in Central after that night was more or less of a traitor. A traitor to his race.

The women were all dead, they claimed. That was bad enough, but what was worse, there was no reason to believe it. It was easy for the creechies to take prisoners in the woods, and nothing would be easier to catch than a terrified girl running out of a burning town. And wouldn’t the little green devils like to get hold of a human girl and
try experiments on her? God knows how many of the women were still alive in the creechie warrens, tied down underground in one of those stinking holes, being touched and felt and crawled over and defiled by the filthy, hairy little monkeymen. It was unthinkable. But by God sometimes you have to be able to think about the unthinkable.

A hopper from King had dropped the prisoners at Central a receiver-transmitter the day after the massacre, and Muhamed had taped all his exchanges with Central starting that day. The most incredible one was a conversation between him and Colonel Dongh. The first time he played it Davidson had torn the thing right off the reel and burned it. Now he wished he had kept it, for the records, as a perfect proof of the total incompetence of the C.O.’s at both Central and New Java. He had given in to his own hotbloodedness, destroying it. But how could he sit there and listen to the recording of the Colonel and the Major discussing total surrender to the creechies, agreeing not to try retaliation, not to defend themselves, to give up all their big weapons, to all squeeze together onto a bit of land picked out for them by the creechies, a reservation conceded to them by their generous conquerors, the little green beasts. It was incredible. Literally incredible.

Probably old Ding Dong and Moo were not actually traitors by intent. They had just gone spla, lost their nerve.
It was this damned planet that did it to them. It took a very strong personality to withstand it. There was something in the air, maybe pollens from all those trees, acting as some kind of drug maybe, that made ordinary humans begin to get as stupid and out of touch with reality as the creechies were. Then, being so outnumbered, they were pushovers for the creechies to wipe out.

It was too bad Muhamed had had to be put out of the way, but he would never have agreed to accept Davidson’s plans, that was clear; he’d been too far gone. Anyone who’d heard that incredible tape would agree. So it was better he got shot before he really knew what was going on, and now no shame would attach to his name, as it would to Dongh’s and all the other officers left alive at Central.

Dongh hadn’t come on the radio lately. Usually it was Juju Sereng, in Engineering. Davidson had used to pal around a lot with Juju and had thought of him as a friend, but now you couldn’t trust anybody any more. And Juju was another asiatiform. It was really queer how many of them had survived the Centralville Massacre; of those he’d talked to, the only non-asio was Gosse. Here in Java the fifty-five loyal men remaining after the reorganization were mostly eurafs like himself, some afros and afrasians, not one pure asio. Blood tells, after all. You couldn’t be fully human without some blood in your veins from the
Cradle of Man. But that wouldn’t stop him from saving those poor yellow bastards at Central, it just helped explain their moral collapse under stress.

“Can’t you realize what kind of trouble you’re making for us, Don?” Juju Sereng had demanded in his flat voice. “We’ve made a formal truce with the creechies. And we’re under direct orders from Earth not to interfere with the hilfs and not to retaliate. Anyhow how the hell can we retaliate? Now all the fellows from King Land and South Central are here with us we’re still less than two thousand, and what have you got there on Java, about sixty-five men isn’t it? Do you really think two thousand men can take on three million intelligent enemies, Don?”

“Juju, fifty men can do it. It’s a matter of will, skill, and weaponry.”

“Batshit! But the point is, Don, a truce has been made. And if it’s broken, we’ve had it. It’s all that keeps us afloat, now. Maybe when the ship gets back from Prestno and sees what happened, they’ll decide to wipe out the creechies. We don’t know. But it does look like the creechies intend to keep the truce, after all it was their idea, and we have got to. They can wipe us out by sheer numbers, any time, the way they did Centralville. There were thousands of them. Can’t you understand that, Don?”

“Listen, Juju, sure I understand. If you’re scared to
use the three hoppers you’ve still got there, you could send ’em over here, with a few fellows who see things like we do here. If I’m going to liberate you fellows singlehanded, I sure could use some more hoppers for the job.”

“You aren’t going to liberate us, you’re going to incinerate us, you damned fool. Get that last hopper over here to Central now: that’s the Colonel’s personal order to you as Acting C.O. Use it to fly your men here; twelve trips, you won’t need more than four local dayperiods. Now act on those orders, and get to it.” Ponk, off the air—afraid to argue with him anymore.

At last he worried that they might send their three hoppers over and actually bomb or strafe New Java Camp; for he was, technically, disobeying orders, and old Dongh wasn’t tolerant of independent elements. Look how he’d taken it out on Davidson already, for that tiny reprisal-raid on Smith. Initiative got punished. What Ding Dong liked was submission, like most officers. The danger with that is that it can make the officer get submissive himself. Davidson finally realized, with a real shock, that the hoppers were no threat to him, because Dongh, Sereng, Gosse, even Benton were
afraid
to send them. The creechies had ordered them to keep the hoppers inside the Human Reservation: and they were obeying orders.

Christ, it made him sick. It was time to act. They’d
been waiting around nearly two weeks now. He had his camp well defended; they had strengthened the stockade fence and built it up so that no little green monkeymen could possibly get over it, and that clever kid Aabi had made lots of neat home-made land mines and sown ’em all around the stockade in a hundred-meter belt. Now it was time to show the creechies that they might push around those sheep on Central but on New Java it was men they had to deal with. He took the hopper up and with it guided an infantry squad of fifteen to a creechiewarren south of camp. He’d learned how to spot the things from the air; the giveaway was the orchards, concentrations of certain kinds of tree, though not planted in rows like humans would. It was incredible how many warrens there were once you learned to spot them. The forest was crawling with the things. The raiding party burned up that warren by hand, and then flying back with a couple of his boys he spotted another, less than four kilos from camp. On that one, just to write his signature real clear and plain for everybody to read, he dropped a bomb. Just a firebomb, not a big one, but baby did it make the green fur fly. It left a big hole in the forest, and the edges of the hole were burning.

Of course that was his real weapon when it actually came to setting up massive retaliation. Forest fire. He could set one of these whole islands on fire, with bombs
and firejelly dropped from the hopper. Have to wait a month or two, till the rainy season was over. Should he burn King or Smith or Central? King first, maybe, as a little warning, since there were no humans left there. Then Central, if they didn’t get in line.

“What are you trying to do?” said the voice on the radio, and it made him grin, it was so agonized, like some old woman being held up. “Do you know what you’re doing, Davidson?”

“Yep.”

“Do you think you’re going to subdue the creechies?” It wasn’t Juju this time, it might be that bigdome Gosse, or any of them; no difference; they all bleated baa.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said with ironic mildness.

“You think if you keep burning up villages they’ll come to you and surrender—three million of them. Right?”

“Maybe.”

“Look, Davidson,” the radio said after a while, whining and buzzing; they were using some kind of emergency rig, having lost the big transmitter, along with that phony ansible which was no loss. “Look, is there somebody else standing by there we can talk to?”

“No; they’re all pretty busy. Say, we’re doing great here, but we’re out of dessert stuff, you know, fruit cocktail, peaches, crap like that. Some of the fellows really miss it. And we were due for a load of maryjanes when
you fellows got blown up. If I sent the hopper over, could you spare us a few crates of sweet stuff and grass?”

A pause. “Yes, send it on over.”

“Great. Have the stuff in a net, and the boys can hook it without landing.” He grinned.

There was some fussing around at the Central end, and all of a sudden old Dongh was on, the first time he’d talked to Davidson. He sounded feeble and out of breath on the whining shortwave. “Listen, Captain, I want to know if you fully realize what form of action your actions on New Java are going to be forcing me into taking. If you continue to disobey your orders. I am trying to reason with you as a reasonable and loyal soldier. In order to ensure the safety of my personnel here at Central I’m going to be put into the position of being forced to tell the natives here that we can’t assume any responsibility at all for your actions.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“What I’m trying to make clear to you is that means that we are going to be put into the position of having to tell them that we can’t stop you from breaking the truce there on Java. Your personnel there is sixty-six men, is that correct, well I want those men safe and sound here at Central with us to wait for the
Shackleton
and keep the Colony together. You’re on a suicide course and I’m responsible for those men you have there with you.”

“No, you’re not, sir. I am. You just relax. Only when you see the jungle burning, pick up and get out into the middle of a Strip, because we don’t want to roast you folks along with the creechies.”