Ursula Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest

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. The two hundred men here had tamed a fair patch of wilderness in just three E-months. Smith Camp: a couple of big corruplast geodesics, forty timber huts built by creechie-labor, 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, 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 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, because 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 farmers, 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 humanoids 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 millenium, 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 leafmold 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 Kees’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. I can’t get 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.”

“They 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.”

“They’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. I 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 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’t nothing. 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; that was clear in 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 them 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 this 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 × 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.”