Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Even songs lose their words as the singers grow older. A game rhyme sung by little children has words:

  Look at us tumbledown

  Stumbledown tumbledown

  All of us tumbledown

  All in a heap!

  The five- and six-year-olds pass the words of the song along to the little ones. Older children cheerfully play the games, falling into wriggling child-heaps with yells of joy, but they do not sing the words, only the tune, vocalised on a neutral syllable.

  Adult Asonu often hum or sing at work, while herding, while rocking the baby. Some of the tunes are traditional, others improvised. Many employ motifs based on the whistles of the anamanu. None of the songs has words; all are hummed or vocalised. At the meetings of the clans and at marriages and funerals the ceremonial choral music is rich in melody and harmonically complex and subtle. No instruments are used, only the voice. The singers practice many days for the ceremonies. Some students of the music of the Asonu believe that their particular spiritual wisdom or insight finds its expression in these great wordless chorales.

  I am inclined to agree with others who, having lived a long time among the Asonu, believe that their group singing is an element of a sacred occasion, and certainly an art, a festive communal act, and a pleasurable release of feeling, but no more. What is sacred to them remains in silence.

  The little children call people by relationship words, mother, uncle, clan sister, friend, etc. If the Asonu have names, we do not know them.

  About ten years ago a zealous believer in the Secret Wisdom of the Asonu kidnapped a child of four from one of the mountain clans in the dead of winter. He had obtained a zoo collector’s permit, and smuggled her back to our plane in an animal cage marked anamanu. Believing that the Asonu enforce silence on their children, his plan was to encourage the little girl to keep talking as she grew up. When adult, he thought, she would thus be able to speak the innate Wisdom which her people would have obliged her to keep secret.

  For the first year or so she would talk to her kidnapper, who, aside from the abominable cruelty of his action, seems to have begun by treating her kindly enough. His knowledge of the Asonu language was limited, and she saw no one else but a small group of sectarians who came to gaze worshipfully at her and listen to her talk. Her vocabulary and syntax gained no enlargement, and began to atrophy. She became increasingly silent.

  Frustrated, the zealot decided to teach her English so that she would be able to express her innate Wisdom in a different tongue. We have only his report, which is that she “refused to learn,” was silent or spoke almost inaudibly when he tried to make her repeat words, and “did not obey.” He ceased to let other people see her. When some members of the sect finally notified the civil authorities, the child was about seven. She had spent three years hidden in a basement room. For a year or more she had been whipped and beaten regularly “to teach her to talk,” her captor explained, “because she’s stubborn.” She was dumb, cowering, undernourished, and brutalised.

  She was promptly returned to her family, who for three years had mourned her, believing she had wandered off and been lost on a glacier. They received her with tears of joy and grief. Her condition since then is not known, because the Interplanary Agency closed the entire area to all visitors, tourist or scientist, at the time she was brought back. No foreigner has been up in the Asonu mountains since. We may well imagine that her people were resentful; but nothing was ever said.

  Feeling at Home with the Hennebet

  I expect people who don’t look like me not to be like me, a reasonable expectation, as expectations go; but it makes my mind slow to admit that people who look like me may not be like me.

  The Hennebet look remarkably like me. That is to say, not only are they the same general shape and size as people on my plane, with fingers and toes and ears and all the other bits we check a baby for, but also they have pallid skin, dark hair, nearsighted eyes of mixed brown and green, and rather short, stocky figures. Their posture is terrible. The young ones are bright and agile, the old ones are thoughtful and forgetful. An unadventurous and timid people, fond of landscape and inclined to run away from strangers, they are monogamous, hardworking, slightly dyspeptic, and deeply domestic.

  When I first came to their plane I felt at home at once, and—perhaps since I looked like one of them and even, in some respects, acted like one of them—the Hennebet did not show any inclination to run away from me. I stayed a week at the hostel. (The Interplanary Agency, which has existed for several kalpas, maintains hostels, inns, and luxury hotels in many popular regions, while protecting vulnerable areas from intrusion.) Then I moved to the home of a widow who supported her family by offering room and board to a few people, all of them natives but me. The widow, her two teenage children, the three other boarders, and I all ate breakfast and dinner together, and so I found myself a member of a native household. They were certainly kindly people, and Mrs. Nannattula was an excellent cook.

  The Hennebet language is notoriously difficult, but I struggled along with it with the help of the translatomat provided by the Agency. I soon felt that I was beginning to know my hosts. They were not really distrustful; their shyness was mostly a defense of their privacy. When they saw I wasn’t invasive, they unstiffened; and I unstiffened by making myself useful. Once I convinced Mrs. Nannattula that I really wanted to help her in the kitchen, she was happy to have a chef’s apprentice. Mr. Battannele needed a listener, and I listened to him talk about politics (Hennebet is a socialist democracy run mainly by committees, not very efficiently, perhaps, but at least not disastrously). And I traded informal language lessons with Tenngo and Annup, nice adolescents. Tenngo wanted to be a biologist and her brother had a gift for languages. My translatomat was useful, but I learned most of what Hennebet I learned by teaching Annup English.

  With Tenngo and Annup I seldom felt the disorientation that would come over me every now and then in conversation with the adults, a sense that I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, that there had been an abrupt, immense discontinuity in comprehension. At first I blamed it on my poor grasp of the language, but it was more than that. There were gaps. Suddenly the Hennebet were on the other side of the gap, totally out of reach. This happened particularly often when I talked with my fellow boarder, old Mrs. Tattava. We’d start out fine, chatting about the weather or the news or her embroidery stitches, and then all at once the discontinuity would occur right in the midst of a sentence. “I find leafstitch nice for filling odd-shaped areas, but it was such a job painting the whole building with little leaves, I thought we’d never finish it!”

  “What building was that?” I said.

  “Hali tutuve,” she said, placidly threading her needle.

  I had not heard the word tutuve before. My translatomat gave it as shrine, sacred enclosure, but had nothing for hali. I went to the library and looked it up in the Encyclopedia of Hennebet. Hali, it said, had been a practice of the people of the Ebbo Peninsula in the previous millennium; also there was a folk dance called halihali.

  Mrs. Tattava was standing halfway up the stairs with a rapt expression. I said good day. “Imagine the number of them!” she said.

  “Of what?” I asked cautiously.

  “The feet,” she said, smiling. “One after the other, one after the other. Such a dance! So long a dance!”

  After several of these excursions I asked Mrs. Nannattula in a circuitous fashion if Mrs. Tattava was having a problem with her memory. Mrs. Nannattula, chopping greens for the tunum poa, laughed and said, “Oh, she’s not all there. Not at all!”

  I said some conventionality—“What a pity.”

  My hostess glanced at me with faint puzzlement but pursued her thought, still smiling. “She says we’re married! I love to talk with her. It’s a real honor to have so much abba in the house, don’t you think? I feel very lucky!”

  I knew abba: it was a common shrub, an evergreen; we used abba berries, pungent, a bit like juniper,
in certain dishes. There was an abba bush in the backyard and a little jar of the dried berries in the cupboard. But I didn’t think the house was full of them.

  I brooded over Mrs. Tattava’s “hali shrine.” I knew of no shrines at all on Hennebet, except the little niche in the living room where Mrs. Nannattula always kept a few flowers or reeds or, come to think of it, a sprig of abba. I asked her if the niche had a name, and she said it was the tutuve.

  Gathering courage, I asked Mrs. Tattava, “Where is the hali tutuve?”

  She did not answer for a while. “Quite far away these days,” she said at last, with a faraway look. Her gaze brightened a little as it returned to me. “Were you there?”

  “No.”

  “It’s so hard to be sure,” she said. “Do you know I never say I wasn’t anywhere any more, because so often it turns out that I am—or are, as I should say, shouldn’t we? It was very beautiful. Oh, that was so far away! And all along it’s right here now!” She looked at me with such cheer and pleasure that I could not help smiling and feeling happy, though I had not the faintest idea what she was talking about.

  Indeed I had at last begun to notice that the people of “my” household, and the Hennebet in general, were very much less like me than I had assumed. It was a matter of temperament, of temper. They were temperate. They were well-tempered. They were good-tempered. It was not a virtue, an ethical triumph; they simply were good-natured people. Very different from me.

  Mr. Battannele talked politics with gusto and energy, with a lively interest in the problems, but it seemed to me that there was something missing, some element I was used to considering part of political talk. He didn’t shift about as some weak-minded folk do, adapting his views to his interlocutor’s, but he never seemed to defend any particular view of his own. Everything was left open. He would have been the most dismal failure on a radio call-in talk show or a TV experts roundtable. He lacked moral outrage. He seemed to have no convictions. Did he even have opinions?

  I often went with him to the corner grogshop and listened to him discussing issues of policy with his friends, several of whom served on governing committees. All of them listened, considered, spoke, often with animation and excitement, interrupting one another to make their points; they got quite passionate; but they never got angry. Nobody ever contradicted anybody, even in such subtle ways as meeting an assertion with silence. Yet they didn’t seem to be trying to avoid dissension, or to conform their ideas to a norm, or to work towards a consensus. And most puzzling of all, these political discussions would suddenly dissolve into laughter—chuckles, belly laughs, sometimes the whole group ending up gasping and wiping their eyes—as if discussing how to run the country was the same thing as sitting around telling funny stories. I never could get the joke.

  Listening on the networks, I never once heard a committee member state that anything must be done. And yet the Hennebet government did get things done. The country seemed to run quite smoothly, taxes were collected, garbage was collected, potholes were repaved, nobody went hungry. Elections were held at frequent intervals; local votes on this and that issue were always being announced on the networks, with informative material supplied. Mrs. Nannattula and Mr. Battannele always voted. The children often voted. When I realised that some people had more votes than others, I was shocked.

  Annup told me that Mrs. Tattava had eighteen votes, although she usually didn’t bother to cast any, and probably could have thirty or forty, if she’d bother to register.

  “But why does she have more votes than other people?”

  “Well, she’s old, you know,” the boy said. He was touchingly modest when he gave me information or corrected my misunderstandings. They all were. They acted as if they were reminding me of something I knew that had slipped my mind. He tried to explain: “Like, you know, I only have one vote.”

  “So as you get older . . . you’re supposed to be wiser?”

  He looked uncertain.

  “Or they honor the elderly by giving them more votes . . . ?”

  “Well, you already have them, you know,” Annup said. “They come back to you, you know? Or you come back to them, actually, Mother says. If you can keep them in mind. The other votes you had.” I must have looked blank as a brick wall. “When you, you know, were living again.” He did not say living before, he said living again.

  “People remember other—their other—lives,” I said, and looked for confirmation.

  Annup thought it over. “I guess so,” he said, uncertain. “Is that how you do it?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I never did. I don’t understand.”

  I brought up the English word transmigration on my translatomat. The Hennebet translation was about birds who fly north in the rainy season and south in the dry season. I brought up reincarnation, and it told me about digestive processes. I brought up my big gun: metempsychosis. The machine told me that there was no word for this “belief” held by many peoples of the other planes that “souls” moved at death into different “bodies.” The translatomat was working in Hennebet, of course, but the words I have put in quotation marks were all in English.

  Annup came by while I was engaged in this research. The Hennebet use no large machinery, doing all their digging and building with hand tools, but they long ago borrowed electronic technologies from people on other planes, using them for information storage and communication and voting and so on. Annup adored the translatomat, which was to him a toy, a game. He laughed now. “‘Belief’—that’s thinking so?” he asked. I nodded. “What’s ‘souls’?” he asked.

  I began with the body; it’s always so much easier, you can make gestures. “This, here, me—arms legs head stomach—body. In your language I think it’s atto?”

  His turn to nod.

  “And your soul is in your body.”

  “Such as tripe?”

  I tried a different tack: “If someone is dead, we say their soul is gone.”

  “Gone?” he echoed. “Where?”

  “The body, the atto stays here—the soul goes away. Some say to an afterlife.”

  He stared, mystified. We spent nearly an hour on the soul-body question, trying to find some common ground in both languages and getting only more confused. The boy was unable to make any distinction at all between matter and spirit. Atto was all one was; one was all atto; how could one be anything else? There was no room for anything else. “How can there be anything more than unnua?” he finally asked me.

  “So each of you—each person—is the universe?” I asked, after checking that unnua did mean universe, all, everything, all time, eternity, entirety, the whole, and finding that it also meant all the courses of a dinner, the contents of a full jug or bottle, and an infant of any species at the moment of birth.

  “How could we not be? Except for slippage, of course.”

  At this point I had to go help his mother make dinner, and was glad to. Metaphysics was never my strong point. It was interesting that these people, who as far as I knew had no organised religion, had a metaphysics which was completely clear to a boy of fifteen. I wondered how and when he had learned it; presumably at school.

  When I asked him where he had learned about atto being unnua and so on, he disclaimed all knowledge. “I know nothing,” he said. “What abba can I have? Please, talk to people who know who they are, like Mrs. Tattava!”

  So I did. I plunged in. She was doing flowers in chain stitch in yellow silk by the window overlooking the canal, where she had the afternoon light. I sat down nearby and said after a while, “Mrs. Tattava, do you remember lives you lived before?”

  “How could a person live more than one life?” she inquired.

  “Well, why do you have eighteen votes?”

  She smiled. She had an extraordinarily sweet, placid smile. “Oh, well, you know, there are all the other persons who are living this life. They’re here too. Everybody gets to vote, don’t they? If they want to. I’m awfully lazy. I don’t like to bother with al
l that information. So mostly I don’t vote. Do you?”

  “I’m not a—” I said, and stopped, and brought up the word citizen on my translatomat. It said that the Hennebet word for citizen was person.

  “I am not sure who I am,” I said cautiously.

  “Many people never are,” she said, quite earnestly now, looking up from her chain stitch. Her eyes amidst their wrinkles and behind their bifocals were brownish-green. The Hennebet seldom look directly at one, but she gazed at me. The gaze was kind, serene, remote, and brief. I felt that she did not see me very clearly. “But it doesn’t matter, you know,” she said. “If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that’s your life, that moment, that’s unnua, that’s all. In a short life I saw my mother’s face, like the sun, so I’m here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I’m unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here,” she repeated, with a comfortable little laugh, and went on with her embroidery.

  I have talked to other people about the Hennebet. Some of them are convinced that the Hennebet do literally experience reincarnation, remembering more and more of their previous lives as they grow older, until at death they rejoin an innumerable multitude of former selves, and are then reborn bringing this immaterial trail or train of old lives into a new life.

  But I can’t square this with the fact that soul and body are a single thing to them, so that either nothing or everything is material or immaterial. Nor does it fit with what Mrs. Tattava said about “all the other persons living this life.” She did not say “other lives.” She did not say “living this life at other times.” She said, “They’re here too.”