The Word for World is Forest Read Free Page B

voices. High, soft, gabble-gobble. Aliens.
    Ducking on hands and knees behind the shack’s plastic roof, which lay on the ground deformed by heat into a batwing shape, he held still and listened.
    Four creechies walked by a few yards from him, on the path. They were wild creechies, naked except for loose leather belts on which knives and pouches hung. None wore the shorts and leather collar supplied to tame creechies. The Volunteers in the compound must have been incinerated along with the humans.
    They stopped a little way past his hiding place, talking their slow gabble-gobble, and Davidson held his breath. He didn’t want them to spot him. What the devil were creechies doing here? They could only be serving as spies and scouts for the invaders.
    One pointed south as it talked, and turned, so that Davidson saw its face. And he recognized it. Creechies all looked alike, but this one was different. He had written his own signature all over that face, less than a year ago. It was the one that had gone spla and attacked him down in Central, the homicidal one, Lyubov’s pet. What in the blue hell was it doing here?
    Davidson’s mind raced, clicked; reactions fast as always, he stood up, sudden, tall, easy, gun in hand. “You creechies. Stop. Stay-put. No moving!”
    His voice cracked out like a whiplash. The four little green creatures did not move. The one with the smashed-inface looked at him across the black rubble with huge, blank eyes that had no light in them.
    “Answer now. This fire, who start it?”
    No answer.
    “Answer now: hurry-up-quick! No answer, then I burn-up first one, then one, then one, see? This fire, who start it?”
    “We burned the camp, Captain Davidson,” said the one from Central, in a queer soft voice that reminded Davidson of some human. “The humans are all dead.”
    “You burned it, what do you mean?”
    He could not recall Scarface’s name for some reason.
    “There were two hundred humans here. Ninety slaves of my people. Nine hundred of my people came out of the forest. First we killed the humans in the place in the forest where they were cutting trees, then we killed those in this place, while the houses were burning. I had thought you were killed. I am glad to see you, Captain Davidson.”
    It was all crazy, and of course a lie. They couldn’t have killed all of them, Ok, Birno, Van Sten, all the rest, two hundred men, some of them would have got out. All the creechies had were bows and arrows. Anyway the creechies couldn’t have done this. Creechies didn’t fight, didn’t kill, didn’t have wars. They were intraspecies non-aggressive, that meant sitting ducks. They didn’t fight back. They sureas hell didn’t massacre two hundred men at a swipe. It was crazy. The silence, the faint stink of burning in the long, warm evening light, the pale-green faces with unmoving eyes that watched him, it all added up to nothing, to a crazy bad dream, a nightmare.
    “Who did this for you?”
    “Nine hundred of my people,” Scarface said in that damned fake-human voice.
    “No, not that. Who else? Who were you acting for? Who told you what to do?”
    “My wife did.”
    Davidson saw then the telltale tension of the creature’s stance, yet it sprang at him so lithe and oblique that his shot missed, burning an arm or shoulder instead of smack between the eyes. And the creechie was on him, half his size and weight yet knocking him right off balance by its onslaught, for he had been relying on the gun and not expecting attack. The thing’s arms were thin, tough, coarse-furred in his grip, and as he struggled with it, it sang.
    He was down on his back, pinned down, disarmed. Four green muzzles looked down at him. The scarfaced one was still singing, a breathless gabble, but with a tune to it. The other three listened, their white teeth showing in grins. He had never seen a creechie smile. He had never looked up into a creechie’s face from below. Alwaysdown, from above. From on top. He