Raj Lyubov Character Analysis

Davidson’s hands were steady now, his body felt appeased, and he knew he wasn’t caught in any dream. He headed back over the Straits, to take the news to Centralville. As he flew he could feel his face relax into its usual calm lines. They couldn’t blame the disaster on him, for he hadn’t even been there. Maybe they’d see that it was significant that the creechies had struck while he was gone, knowing they’d fail if he was there to organize the defense. And there was one good thing that would come out of this. They’d do like they should have done to start with, and clean up the planet for human occupation. Not even Lyubov could stop them from rubbing out the creechies now, not when they heard it was Lyubov’s pet creechie who’d led the massacre! They’d go in for rat-extermination for a while, now; and maybe, just maybe, they’d hand that little job over to him. At that thought he could have smiled.

“[…] Much of what he told me, I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t the language that kept me from understanding; I know his tongue, and he learned ours; we made a writing of the two languages together. Yet there were things he said I could never understand. He said the yumens are from outside the forest. That’s quite clear. He said they want the forest: the trees for wood, the land to plant grass on.” Selver’s voice, though still soft, had taken on resonance; the people among the silver trees listened. “That too is clear, to those of us who’ve seen them cutting down the world. He said the yumens are men like us, that we’re indeed related, as close kin maybe as the Red Deer to the Greybuck. He said that they come from another place which is not the forest; the trees there are all cut down; it has a sun, not our sun, which is a star. All this, as you see, wasn’t clear to me. I say his words but don’t know what they mean. It does not matter much. It is clear that they want our forest for themselves […] ”

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?

“A human society with an effective war-barrier! What’s the cost, Dr. Lyubov?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Lepennon. Perhaps change. They’re a static, stable, uniform society. They have no history. Perfectly integrated, and wholly unprogressive. You might say that like the forest they live in, they’ve attained a climax state. But I don’t mean to imply that they’re incapable of adaptation.”

[…]

“Well, I wonder if they’re not proving their adaptability, now. By adapting their behavior to us. To the Earth Colony. For four years they’ve behaved to us as they do to one another. Despite the physical differences, they recognized us as members of their species, as men. However, we have not responded as members of their species should respond. We have ignored the responses, the rights and obligations of non-violence. We have killed, raped, dispersed, and enslaved the native humans, destroyed their communities, and cut down their forests. It wouldn’t be surprising if they’d decided that we are not human.”

“ […] We’ve succeeded, here on Central, by following the Plan: erosion is minimal, and the cleared soil is highly arable. To log off a forest doesn’t, after all, mean to make a desert—except perhaps from the point of view of a squirrel. We can’t forecast precisely how the native forest life-systems will adapt to a new woodland-prairie-plowland ambiance foreseen in the Development Plan, but we know the chances are good for a large percentage of adaptation and survival.”

“That’s what the Bureau of Land Management said about Alaska during the First Famine,” said Lyubov. […] “How many Sitka spruce have you seen in your lifetime, Gosse? Or snowy owl? or wolf? or Eskimo? The survival percentage of native Alaskan species in habitat, after 15 years of the Development Program, was .3%. It’s now zero.—A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”

Lyubov sat and took it. Let the men from the ship see them all passing the blame around like a hot brick: all the better. The more dissension they showed, the likelier were these Emissaries to have them checked and watched over. And he was to blame; he had been wrong. To hell with my self-respect so long as the forest people get a chance, Lyubov thought, and so strong a sense of his own humiliation and self-sacrifice came over him that tears rose to his eyes.

The townsfolk also knew that the 1200 slaves at Centralville had been freed soon after the Smith Camp massacre, and Lyubov agreed with the Colonel that the natives might take the second event to be a result of the first. That gave what Colonel Dongh would call ‘an erroneous impression,’ but it probably wasn’t important. What was important was that the slaves had been freed. Wrongs done could not be righted; but at least they were not still being done. They could start over: the natives without that painful, unanswerable wonder as to why the ‘yumens’ treated men like animals; and he without the burden of explanation and the gnawing of irremediable guilt.

And that’s one trouble with the colony, he thought as he lifted the hopper and Tuntar vanished beneath the oaks and the leafless orchards. We haven’t got any old women. No old men either, except Dongh and he’s only about sixty. But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think. The Athsheans are governed, in so far as they have government, by old women. Intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that’s their arrangement. It has charm, and it works—for them. I wish the administration had sent out a couple of grannies along with all those nubile fertile high-breasted young women. Now that girl I had over the other night, she’s really very nice, and nice in bed, she has a kind heart, but my God it’ll be forty years before she’ll say anything to a man…

And the translator is the god. 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.

But had he learned to kill his fellowmen among his own dreams of outrage and bereavement, or from the undreamed-of-actions of the strangers? Was he speaking his own language, or was he speaking Captain Davidson’s? That which seemed to rise from the root of his own suffering and express his own changed being, might in fact be an infection, a foreign plague, which would not make a new people of his race, but would destroy them.

“Should we have let them live?” said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse’s, but softly, his voice singing a little. “To breed like insects in the carcass of the World? To overrun us? We killed them to sterilize you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse. Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You’re not sane: there’s not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane. And that’s why we had to kill you, before you drove us mad.”

Something stirred down inside him, something almost like laughter. By God they couldn’t get him down! If his own men betrayed him, and human intelligence couldn’t do any more for him, then he used their own trick against them—played dead like this, and triggered this instinct reflex that kept them from killing anybody who took that position. They just stood around him, muttering at each other. They couldn’t hurt him. It was as if he was a god.

Davidson’s hands were steady now, his body felt appeased, and he knew he wasn’t caught in any dream. He headed back over the Straits, to take the news to Centralville. As he flew he could feel his face relax into its usual calm lines. They couldn’t blame the disaster on him, for he hadn’t even been there. Maybe they’d see that it was significant that the creechies had struck while he was gone, knowing they’d fail if he was there to organize the defense. And there was one good thing that would come out of this. They’d do like they should have done to start with, and clean up the planet for human occupation. Not even Lyubov could stop them from rubbing out the creechies now, not when they heard it was Lyubov’s pet creechie who’d led the massacre! They’d go in for rat-extermination for a while, now; and maybe, just maybe, they’d hand that little job over to him. At that thought he could have smiled.

“[…] Much of what he told me, I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t the language that kept me from understanding; I know his tongue, and he learned ours; we made a writing of the two languages together. Yet there were things he said I could never understand. He said the yumens are from outside the forest. That’s quite clear. He said they want the forest: the trees for wood, the land to plant grass on.” Selver’s voice, though still soft, had taken on resonance; the people among the silver trees listened. “That too is clear, to those of us who’ve seen them cutting down the world. He said the yumens are men like us, that we’re indeed related, as close kin maybe as the Red Deer to the Greybuck. He said that they come from another place which is not the forest; the trees there are all cut down; it has a sun, not our sun, which is a star. All this, as you see, wasn’t clear to me. I say his words but don’t know what they mean. It does not matter much. It is clear that they want our forest for themselves […] ”

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?

“A human society with an effective war-barrier! What’s the cost, Dr. Lyubov?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Lepennon. Perhaps change. They’re a static, stable, uniform society. They have no history. Perfectly integrated, and wholly unprogressive. You might say that like the forest they live in, they’ve attained a climax state. But I don’t mean to imply that they’re incapable of adaptation.”

[…]

“Well, I wonder if they’re not proving their adaptability, now. By adapting their behavior to us. To the Earth Colony. For four years they’ve behaved to us as they do to one another. Despite the physical differences, they recognized us as members of their species, as men. However, we have not responded as members of their species should respond. We have ignored the responses, the rights and obligations of non-violence. We have killed, raped, dispersed, and enslaved the native humans, destroyed their communities, and cut down their forests. It wouldn’t be surprising if they’d decided that we are not human.”

“ […] We’ve succeeded, here on Central, by following the Plan: erosion is minimal, and the cleared soil is highly arable. To log off a forest doesn’t, after all, mean to make a desert—except perhaps from the point of view of a squirrel. We can’t forecast precisely how the native forest life-systems will adapt to a new woodland-prairie-plowland ambiance foreseen in the Development Plan, but we know the chances are good for a large percentage of adaptation and survival.”

“That’s what the Bureau of Land Management said about Alaska during the First Famine,” said Lyubov. […] “How many Sitka spruce have you seen in your lifetime, Gosse? Or snowy owl? or wolf? or Eskimo? The survival percentage of native Alaskan species in habitat, after 15 years of the Development Program, was .3%. It’s now zero.—A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”

Lyubov sat and took it. Let the men from the ship see them all passing the blame around like a hot brick: all the better. The more dissension they showed, the likelier were these Emissaries to have them checked and watched over. And he was to blame; he had been wrong. To hell with my self-respect so long as the forest people get a chance, Lyubov thought, and so strong a sense of his own humiliation and self-sacrifice came over him that tears rose to his eyes.

The townsfolk also knew that the 1200 slaves at Centralville had been freed soon after the Smith Camp massacre, and Lyubov agreed with the Colonel that the natives might take the second event to be a result of the first. That gave what Colonel Dongh would call ‘an erroneous impression,’ but it probably wasn’t important. What was important was that the slaves had been freed. Wrongs done could not be righted; but at least they were not still being done. They could start over: the natives without that painful, unanswerable wonder as to why the ‘yumens’ treated men like animals; and he without the burden of explanation and the gnawing of irremediable guilt.

And that’s one trouble with the colony, he thought as he lifted the hopper and Tuntar vanished beneath the oaks and the leafless orchards. We haven’t got any old women. No old men either, except Dongh and he’s only about sixty. But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think. The Athsheans are governed, in so far as they have government, by old women. Intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that’s their arrangement. It has charm, and it works—for them. I wish the administration had sent out a couple of grannies along with all those nubile fertile high-breasted young women. Now that girl I had over the other night, she’s really very nice, and nice in bed, she has a kind heart, but my God it’ll be forty years before she’ll say anything to a man…

And the translator is the god. 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.

But had he learned to kill his fellowmen among his own dreams of outrage and bereavement, or from the undreamed-of-actions of the strangers? Was he speaking his own language, or was he speaking Captain Davidson’s? That which seemed to rise from the root of his own suffering and express his own changed being, might in fact be an infection, a foreign plague, which would not make a new people of his race, but would destroy them.

“Should we have let them live?” said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse’s, but softly, his voice singing a little. “To breed like insects in the carcass of the World? To overrun us? We killed them to sterilize you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse. Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You’re not sane: there’s not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane. And that’s why we had to kill you, before you drove us mad.”

Something stirred down inside him, something almost like laughter. By God they couldn’t get him down! If his own men betrayed him, and human intelligence couldn’t do any more for him, then he used their own trick against them—played dead like this, and triggered this instinct reflex that kept them from killing anybody who took that position. They just stood around him, muttering at each other. They couldn’t hurt him. It was as if he was a god.