The Word for World is Forest

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1972

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary

Lyubov visits Selver in the foothill village of Tuntar. He has been worried that the Athsheans would see the freeing of their slaves as a result of the Smith Camp massacre. Once Lyubov lands, an old woman named Sherrar takes him to the Men’s Lodge and say they are dreaming inside. A young Athshean girl stops and stares at him with undisguised hostility. Lyubov intends to show that he is still a friend and wonders, “How could their way of feeling and thinking have changed so fast, after so long?” (108).

Selver comes out of the Lodge. Lyubov realizes that he has come to love Selver. Selver says he cannot talk and that he is leaving that day. “‘Lyubov, you shouldn’t have come here. You should leave Central two nights from now. I don’t know what you are. It would be better if I had never known you,’” (112) he says. After he walks away, Sherrar tells Lyubov that Selver is a god now. Lyubov thinks about the two years he and Selver spent learning from each other, and mourns them. He remembers the day after Selver’s wife was raped and killed by Davidson. He came into the camp to find Davidson beating Selver. Selver was bloody, and his face was mutilated, but he kept standing and returning to the fight, which eventually unnerved Davidson. From that day, Lyubov hated Davidson. Lyubov carried Selver to his quarters to care for him.

Some of the men scorned him for his compassion toward a creature they saw as less than human, but he was too angry to care about their reactions. After two weeks of Davidson threatening to kill Selver as soon as he had the chance, Lyubov flew Selver to a town called Broter and left him there. After Lyubov helped Selver escape, the men came to mistrust him entirely. An ecologist named Gosse asked him if he was a masochist, since he knew the creechies would be destroyed, but he kept studying them: “‘A biologist studying a rat colony doesn’t start reaching in and rescuing pet rats of his that get attacked, you know’” (121). Lyubov told Gosse that Selver is his only friend.

Lyubov wonders what Sherrar means when she says that Selver is now a god. She used the word “sh’a” (121) to describe him. Sh’ab could mean god or translator: “Was a sh’ab one who translated the language of dream and philosophy, the Men’s Tongue, into the everyday speech?” (123). All Dreamers did that, but “Selver had brought a new word into the language of his people. He had done a new deed. The word, the deed, murder. Only a god could lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds” (123). Lyubov wonders if Selver got the idea for killing from Davidson’s own dreams. He files a report after returning but omits that Selver was there, that some of the natives looked at him with hostility, and that there were a surprising number of strangers in town.

Two nights after returning, Lyubov is wakened by an explosion, and “[h]e was the only man in Centralville not taken by surprise. In that moment he knew what he was: a traitor” (126). Outside, the camp is burning. An Athshean cuts a little girl’s throat. The building collapses, and a falling timber kills Lyubov.

Chapter 6 Summary

Many of the people Selver leads on the attack have never seen a yumen; “[t]hey had come because they followed Selver, because they were driven by the evil dream and only Selver could teach them how to master it” (130). After they are done killing, they move out of the camp. On the way, Selver lifts a timber off Lyubov. He looks at the destruction he has caused and thinks, “This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me” (133). In a dream, he asks Lyubov why he stayed and why he is different than the other men. Lyubov tells Selver that he must stop and go back to his roots. Selver says that the evil dream will not stop until all of the yumens are gone. A group of Selver’s people find him wandering in the dream, crying. They take him to Endtor, where there is a creechie pen in which 500 yumens are imprisoned. Selver dreams for two days, then wakes.

He goes to talk to Colonel Dongh, who is in one of the holding pens. Gosse reports that Dongh is ill and cannot speak to him. An Athshean named Reswan opens the gate, and Gosse comes out to talk. Selver promises him that if they can agree to terms, the killing is over. Fewer than 2,000 yumens are still living, and all of their women are dead. The yumens must live in the areas they have forested for three years until a ship returns to collect them. Gosse tells him that they are children and savages: “‘You killed the women. You burned them alive, slaughtered them like animals!’” (141). Selver says that yumens are insane, and the Athsheans killed the women to sterilize them, to stem the breeding of more insanity. He sends Gosse back into the compound.

Selver is exhausted. An old man tells him that he needs to sing, but Selver asks him to sing for him instead. He does, and Selver dreams of Lyubov lying down beside him. The next day, the yumens ask to speak with him. He meets with Gosse, Dongh, and three other officers. One of them is named Benton, and he used to castrate creechies in public as punishment for what he called their laziness. Colonel Dongh asks Selver to repeat the terms of the agreement that will guarantee the humans’ safety. He tells Selver that they have a radio and have been communicating with the other camps. They could have asked for weapons to be dropped and airships to support them in an attack, but they haven’t.

The yumens accept the terms: They will withdraw from their outposts and live within one area. They will not be allowed to enter the forest. Selver says they can keep their four airships long enough to deliver themselves to their reservation, but then the ships must be destroyed. The yumens argue, and Selver suggest that they keep the ships but destroy the weapons on them. Dongh agrees, even though Benton argues. Gosse says that they don’t know what will happen when the ship returns in three years; he can’t say how the other yumens will react to the situation on the planet. Benton implies that Lyubov is a traitor and that everything the creechies know about came from secrets passed on to them by Lyubov.

Selver tells them to contact the other yumens. Their doors will be opened that day, and they will be free to leave.

Chapters 5-6 Analysis

Lyubov finds his visit to Selver disappointing. The natives look at him with mistrust and, in some cases, hostility. He knows that the humans’ involvement in the planet has caused a shift in the thinking of the Athsheans, who were never hostile before. He thinks of all that he and Selver have shared and is saddened when Selver says that he does not know what Lyubov is anymore. When Selver states that it would have been better if they had never met, Lyubov also mourns the fact that Selver speaks with such certainty. His memories of the fight between Selver and Davidson, and the loss of trust that Lyubov’s intervention cost him with his own men, remind him that the bond he thought he and Selver shared is not the same to Selver. He realizes that he does not know how Selver defines friendship and worries that his efforts might have been a waste of time. But he knows this is not true, as evidenced by his continued work on behalf of the Athsheans. When Lyubov is killed in the Centralville attack, he is doing what he believes is right: trying to help the forest people.

In Chapter 6, Selver is forced to admit that he has lost some control of the situation and that he may have misinterpreted his dreams. When he speaks of the dream driving him, instead of the opposite, he sounds fatalistic. The terms of the truce do not seem to bring him any joy or satisfaction, and he does not treat the massacre at Centralville as a victory over the yumens. His discussion of human nature driving them to kill—necessitating a first strike—is analogous to the global discussion about the need to stop communism from spreading through Vietnam that was occurring at the time of publication. As Chapter 6 ends, the truce is in place, but the general mood on both sides is of tragedy.