The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

it, try daydreaming. Begin as Selver taught you. Although knowing nothing of electricity he could not really grasp the principle of the EEG, as soon as he heard about alpha waves and when they appear he had said, “Oh yes, you mean this,” and there appeared the unmistakable alpha-squiggles on the graph recording what went on inside his small green head; and he had taught Lyubov how to turn on and off the alpha-rhythms in one half-hour lesson. There really was nothing to it. But not now, the world is too much with us, ow, ow, ow above the right ear I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, for the Athsheans had burned Smith Camp day before yesterday and killed two hundred men. Two hundred and seven to be precise. Every man alive except the Captain. No wonder pills couldn’t get at the center of his migraine, for it was on an island two hundred miles away two days ago. Over the hills and far away. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.And among the ashes, all his knowledge of the High Intelligence Life Forms of World 41. Dust, rubbish, a mess of false data and fake hypotheses. Nearly five E-years here, and he had believed the Athsheans to be incapable of killing men, his kind or their kind. He had written long papers to explain how and why they couldn’t kill men. All wrong. Dead wrong.
    What had he failed to see?
    It was nearly time to be going over to the meeting at HQ. Cautiously Lyubov stood up, moving all in one piece so that the right side of his head would not fall off; he approached his desk with the gait of a man underwater, poured out a shot of General Issue vodka, and drank it. It turned him inside out: it extraverted him: it normalized him. He felt better. He went out, and unable to stand the jouncing of his motorbike, started to walk down the long, dusty main street of Centralville to HQ. Passing the Luau, he thought with greed of another vodka; but Captain Davidson was just going in the door, and Lyubov went on.
    The people from the
Shackleton
were already in the conference room. Commander Yung, whom he had met before, had brought some new faces down from orbit this time. They were not in Navy uniform; after a moment Lyubov recognized them, with a slight shock, as non-Terran humans. He sought an introduction at once. One, Mr. Or, was a Hairy Cetian, dark gray, stocky, and dour; the other,Mr. Lepennon, was tall, white, and comely: a Hainishman. They greeted Lyubov with interest, and Lepennon said, “I’ve just been reading your report on the conscious control of paradoxical sleep among the Athsheans, Dr. Lyubov,” which was pleasant, and it was pleasant also to be called by his own, earned title of doctor. Their conversation indicated that they had spent some years on Earth, and that they might be hilfers, or something like it; but the Commander, introducing them, had not mentioned their status or position.
    The room was filling up. Gosse, the colony ecologist, came in; so did all the high brass; so did Captain Susun, head of Planet Development—logging operations—whose captaincy like Lyubov’s was an invention necessary to the peace of the military mind. Captain Davidson came in alone, straight-backed and handsome, his lean, rugged face calm and rather stern. Guards stood at all the doors. The Army necks were all stiff as crowbars. The conference was plainly an Investigation.
Whose fault?
My fault, Lyubov thought despairingly; but out of his despair he looked across the table at Captain Don Davidson with detestation and contempt.
    Commander Yung had a very quiet voice. “As you know, gentlemen, my ship stopped here at World 41 to drop you off a new load of colonists, and nothing more;
Shackleton’
s mission is to World 88, Prestno, one of theHainish Group. However, this attack on your outpost camp, since it chanced to occur during our week here, can’t be simply ignored; particularly in the light of certain developments which you would have been informed of a little later, in the normal course of