Ursula Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest

“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.”

“Now listen, Davidson, I order you to hand your command over to Lt. Temba at once and report to me here,” said the distant whining voice, and Davidson suddenly cut off the radio, sickened. They were all spla, playing at still being soldiers, in full retreat from reality. There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough.

As he expected, the local creechies did absolutely nothing about his raids on the warrens. The only way to handle them, as he’d known from the start, was to terrorize them and never let up on them. If you did that, they knew who was boss, and knuckled under. A lot of the villages within a thirty-kilo radius seemed to be deserted now before he got to them, but he kept his men going out to burn them up every few days.

The fellows were getting rather jumpy. He had kept them logging, since that’s what forty-eight of the fifty-five loyal survivors were, loggers. But they knew that the robo-freighters from Earth wouldn’t be called down to load up the lumber, but would just keep coming in and circling in orbit waiting for the signal that didn’t come. No use cutting trees just for the hell of it; it was hard work. Might as well burn them. He exercised the men in teams, developing fire-setting techniques. It was still too rainy for them to do much, but it kept their minds busy. If only he had the other three hoppers, he’d really be able to hit and run. He considered a raid on Central to liberate the hoppers, but did not yet mention this idea even to Aabi and Temba, his best men. Some of the boys would get cold feet at the idea of an armed raid on their own HQ. They kept talking about “when we get back with the others.” They didn’t know those others had abandoned them, betrayed them, sold their skins to the creechies. He didn’t tell them that, they couldn’t take it.

One day he and Aabi and Temba and another good sound man would just take the hopper over, then three of them jump out with machine guns, take a hopper apiece, and so home again, home again, jiggety jog. With four nice egg-beaters to beat eggs with. Can’t make an omelet without beating eggs. Davidson laughed aloud, in the darkness of his bungalow. He kept that plan hidden just a little longer, because it tickled him so much to think about it.

After two more weeks they had pretty well closed out the creechie warrens within walking distance, and the forest was neat and tidy. No vermin. No smoke-puffs over the trees. Nobody hopping out of bushes and flopping down on the ground with their eyes shut, waiting for you to stomp them. No little green men. Just a mess of trees and some burned places. The boys were getting really edgy and mean; it was time to make the hopper-raid. He told his plan one night to Aabi, Temba, and Post.

None of them said anything for a minute, then Aabi said, “What about fuel, Captain?”

“We got enough fuel.”

“Not for four hoppers; wouldn’t last a week.”

“You mean there’s only a month’s supply left for this one?”

Aabi nodded.

“Well then, we pick up a little fuel too, looks like.”

“How?”

“Put your minds to it.”

They all sat there looking stupid. It annoyed him. They looked to him for everything. He was a natural leader, but he liked men who thought for themselves too. “Figure it out, it’s your line of work, Aabi,” he said, and went out for a smoke, sick of the way everybody acted, like they’d lost their nerve. They just couldn’t face the cold hard facts.

They were low on maryjanes now and he hadn’t had one for a couple of days. It didn’t do anything for him. The night was overcast and black, damp, warm, smelling like spring. Ngenene went by walking like an ice-skater, or almost like a robot on treads; he turned slowly through a gliding step and gazed at Davidson, who stood on the bungalow porch in the dim light from the doorway. He was a power-saw operator, a huge man. “The source of my energy is connected to the Great Generator I cannot be switched off,” he said in a level tone, gazing at Davidson.

“Get to your barracks and sleep it off!” Davidson said in the whipcrack voice that nobody ever disobeyed, and after a moment Ngenene skated carefully on, ponderous and graceful. Too many of the men were using hallies more and more heavily. There was plenty, but the stuff was for loggers relaxing on Sundays, not for soldiers of a tiny outpost marooned on a hostile world. They had no time for getting high, for dreaming. He’d have to lock the stuff up. Then some of the boys might crack. Well, let ’em crack. Can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. Maybe he could send them back to Central in exchange for some fuel. You give me two, three tanks of gas and I’ll give you two, three warm bodies, loyal soldiers, good loggers, just your type, a little far gone in bye-bye dreamland….

He grinned, and was going back inside to try this one out on Temba and the others, when the guard posted up on the lumberyard smoke stack yelled. “They’re coming!” he screeched out in a high voice, like a kid playing Blacks and Rhodesians. Somebody else over on the west side of the stockade began yelling too. A gun went off.

And they came. Christ, they came. It was incredible. There were thousands of them, thousands. No sound, no noise at all, until that screech from the guard; then one gunshot; then an explosion—a land mine going up—and another, one after another, and hundreds and hundreds of torches flaring up lit one from another and being thrown and soaring through the black wet air like rockets, and the walls of the stockade coming alive with creechies, pouring in, pouring over, pushing, swarming, thousands of them. It was like an army of rats Davidson had seen once when he was a little kid, in the last Famine, in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up. Something had driven the rats out of their holes and they had come up in daylight, seething up over the wall, a pulsing blanket of fur and eyes and little hands and teeth, and he had yelled for his mom and run like crazy, or was that only a dream he’d had when he was a kid? It was important to keep cool. The hopper was parked in the creechie-pen; it was still dark over on that side and he got there at once. The gate was locked, he always kept it locked in case one of the weak sisters got a notion of flying off to Papa Ding Dong some dark night. It seemed to take a long time to get the key out and fit it in the lock and turn it right, but it was just a matter of keeping cool, and then it took a long time to sprint to the hopper and unlock it. Post and Aabi were with him now. At last came the huge rattle of the rotors, beating eggs, covering up all the weird noises, the high voices yelling and screeching and singing. Up they went, and hell dropped away below them: a pen full of rats, burning.