The Word for World is Forest Read Free

give me the creeps.”
    That was queer, coming from a tough, quiet guy like Ok.
    “Well, I agree with you, actually, Ok, that they’re not worth the trouble, or the risk. If that fart Lyubov wasn’t around and the Colonel wasn’t so stuck on following the Code, I think we might just clean out the areas we settle, instead of this Voluntary Labor routine. They’re going to get rubbed out sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner. It’s just how things happen to be. Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or be assimilated. But we sure as hell can’t assimilate a lot of green monkeys. And like you say, they’re just bright enough that they’ll never be quite trustworthy. Like those big monkeys used to live in Africa, what were they called?”
    “Gorillas?”
    “Right. We’ll get on better without creechies here, just like we get on better without gorillas in Africa. They’re in our way. . . . But Daddy Ding-Dong he say use creechie-labor, so we use creechie-labor. For a while. Right? See you tonight, Ok.”
    “Right, Captain.”
    Davidson checked out the hopper from Smith CampHQ: a pine-plank 4-meter cube, two desks, a watercooler, Lt. Birno repairing a walkie-talkie. “Don’t let the camp burn down, Birno.”
    “Bring me back a Collie, Cap. Blonde. 34–22–36.”
    “Christ, is that all?”
    “I like ’em neat, not floppy, see.” Birno expressively outlined his preference in the air. Grinning, Davidson went on up to the hangar. As he brought the helicopter back over camp he looked down at it: kid’s blocks, sketch-lines of paths, long stump-stubbled clearings, all shrinking as the machine rose and he saw the green of the uncut forests of the great island, and beyond that dark green the pale green of the sea going on and on. Now Smith Camp looked like a yellow spot, a fleck on a vast green tapestry.
    He crossed Smith Straits and the wooded, deep-folded ranges of north Central Island, and came down by noon in Centralville. It looked like a city, at least after three months in the woods; there were real streets, real buildings, it had been there since the Colony began four years ago. You didn’t see what a flimsy little frontier-town it really was, until you looked south of it a half-mile and saw glittering above the stumplands and the concrete pads a single golden tower, taller than anything in Centralville. The ship wasn’t a big one but it looked so big, here. And it was only a launch, a lander, a ship’s boat; the NAFALship of the line,
Shackleton
, was half a million kilos up, in orbit. The launch was just a hint, just a fingertip of the hugeness, the power, the golden precision and grandeur of the star-bridging technology of Earth.
    That was why tears came to Davidson’s eyes for a second at the sight of the ship from home. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He was a patriotic man, it just happened to be the way he was made.
    Soon enough, walking down those frontier-town streets with their wide vistas of nothing much at each end, he began to smile. For the women were there, all right, and you could tell they were fresh ones. They mostly had long tight skirts and big shoes like goloshes, red or purple or gold, and gold or silver frilly shirts. No more nipplepeeps. Fashions had changed; too bad. They all wore their hair piled up high, it must be sprayed with that glue stuff they used. Ugly as hell, but it was the sort of thing only women would do to their hair, and so it was provocative. Davidson grinned at a chesty little euraf with more hair than head; he got no smile, but a wag of the retreating hips that said plainly: Follow follow follow me. But he didn’t. Not yet. He went to Central HQ: quickstone and plastiplate Standard Issue, 40 offices, 10 watercoolers and a basement arsenal, and checked in with New Tahiti Central Colonial Administration Command. He met a couple of the launch-crew,put in a request for a new semirobo bark-stripper at Forestry, and got his old pal Juju