He tells them they are not just fighting for this part of the forest, or these few trees, but for the very future of their world. He says the history of the aliens they call the sky people is one of blood. For as long as can be remembered, they take what is not theirs. They take the land and hunting grounds of other people, and kill them, or put them in places they cannot live. They call this progress, and it has led them down a path to sickness and death. Their world, their forest, is a dying place. A poisoned place. They have killed their mother. And they will do the same here. They must be driven away.
When they come again they will come with all their force, and we must be ready. We must fight, to our last breath, or they will rape and kill our mother as they did their own.
Josh hears a familiar voice behind him.
GRACE: Nice speech, kid.
Josh spins around, seeing Grace's avatar stepping up behind him. She is bright-eyed and as alive as he ever saw her. He is dumbfounded. She walks up to him, grinning.
JOSH: Grace! Grace... It's you!
GRACE: Of course it's me. Moron.
Finally, he whoops and picks her up, spinning her around.
JOSH: Is it going to hurt my brain if you: tell me how...?
Grace says she's not sure exactly how it works. Scientifically that is. But the short version is that under certain circumstances, the Na'vi can do this thing... call it a soul transfer. When I was dying, the trees stored... well, they stored my mind, my emotions, my memories... me. Then they downloaded it all to this body. No more turning into a pumpkin. I get to be Cinderella all the time, now.
Josh is lost. The trees stored you? Grace laughs, and puts her arm around him. Josh, she says, this may take a bit of explaining.
Back home we called it Gaia. A single being made up of all that's living on the whole planet. The only problem is, back home it's a myth. There is no Gaia. If she ever lived, she's been long dead.
But it's not a myth here. On Pandora there is only one entity. The forest is its brain. Like a vast neural net, with every tree being a single brain cell, or dendrite. And all the roots co-mingling... those are the synapses. One vast sentience, covering all the land. And everything that walks and breaths and lives within it is a part of it. It is like a government, which keeps everything in balance. That's why the Na'vi don't kill, or make war. No ownership, no territory. They are given all they need... a place to live, a part in the great pageant of life here.
Is she intelligent, this Gaia? This Mother Forest? Sort of. But she's almost more like a kind of bio-internet. The willows are access points, the Well of Souls and other places like it around the planet are like big servers, storage centers. A place of memories. The Gaia mind can be accessed from anywhere. It can be used to communicate over long distances. That's how the clan knew Zuleika had found you. She accessed the willows. And that's why the Na'vi only have one language all over the planet, with regional dialects of course, just for fun.
But more than a network, she has a will. An ego. She guides, she shapes... she protects. Sometimes she sacrifices something she loves for the greater good. And sometimes she is very strict. Gaia does not take sides. Gaia will not necessarily save you... her role is to protect all life, and the balance of life... and to protect that balance, death is necessary. She is, quite literally, Mother Nature. And it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.
But she can be petitioned... by a process surprisingly like prayer. Gaia listens, and reacts as she sees fit, sometimes in your favor... sometimes not. But you have to really get her attention if you want her to do something big... it takes a lot of people plugging in and petitioning... they cannot forceably will Gaia to do anything, and Gaia does not answer directly. But she listens.
Since the Na'vi are the highest form of ambulatory life, they are valued for their input, and have a special relationship with Gaia. In the case of this infection of aliens, they are the best source of insight into what is going on, because they can communicate directly with the aliens.
Gaia knows instinctively that the humans are a disease, an organism from outside. This is a new thing for her, unprecedented, and there are no guidelines for what to do. The first and most obvious thing to do is fight the infection, try to contain it. So she sent attacking flora and fauna to surround the alien infection and keep it from spreading. Gaia was functioning like an immune system, sending antibodies to the infection site. Gaia was doing chemotherapy and we were the tumor.
That's why Hell's Gate was under constant attack... a bio- barrage of predators and poisonous plants which was an ecological cartoon. We just thought we'd landed at a particularly bad spot. And that's why, once we got deep into the forest, we saw a balanced ecosystem.