Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The year begins, Kergemmeg said, when in the cities of the plains and deserts of the south, the Year Priests give the word and great crowds gather to see the sun pause at the peak of a certain tower or stab through a certain target with an arrow of light at dawn: the moment of solstice. Now increasing heat will parch the southern grasslands and prairies of wild grain, and in the long dry season the rivers will run low and the wells of the city will go dry. Spring follows the sun northward, melting snow from those far hills, brightening valleys with green . . . And the Ansarac will follow the sun.

  “Well, I’m off,” old friend says to old friend in the city street. “See you around!” And the young people, the almost-one-year-olds—to us they’d be people of twenty-one or twenty-two—drift away from their households and groups of pals, their colleges and sports clubs, and seek out, among the labyrinthine apartment complexes and communal dwellings and hostelries of the city, one or the other of the parents from whom they parted, back in the summer. Sauntering casually in, they remark, “Hullo, Dad,” or “Hullo, Mother. Seems like everybody’s going back north.” And the parent, careful not to insult by offering guidance over the long route they came half the young one’s life ago, says, “Yes, I’ve been thinking about it myself. It certainly would be nice to have you with us. Your sister’s in the other room, packing.”

  And so by ones, twos, and threes, the people abandon the city. The exodus is a long process, without any order to it. Some people leave quite soon after the solstice, and others say about them, “What a hurry they’re in,” or, “Shennenne just has to get there first so she can grab the old homesite.” Some people linger in the city till it is almost empty, and still can’t make up their mind to leave the hot and silent streets, the sad, shadeless, deserted squares that were so full of crowds and music all through the long half year. But first and last they all set out on the roads that lead north. And once they go, they go with speed.

  Most carry with them only what they can carry in a backpack or load on a ruba (from Kergemmeg’s description, rubac are something like small, feathered donkeys). Some of the traders who have become wealthy during the desert season start out with whole trains of rubac loaded with goods and treasures. Though most people travel alone or in a small family group, on the more popular roads they follow pretty close after one another. Larger groups form temporarily in places where the going is hard and the older and weaker people need help gathering and carrying food.

  There are no children on the road north.

  Kergemmeg did not know how many Ansarac there are but guessed some hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million. All of them join the migration.

  As they go up into the mountainous Middle Lands, they do not bunch together, but spread out onto hundreds of different tracks, some taken by many, others by only a few, some clearly marked, others so cryptic that only people who have been on them before could ever trace the turnings. “That’s when it’s good to have a three-year-old along,” Kergemmeg said. “Somebody who’s been up the way twice.” They travel very light and very fast. They live off the land except in the arid heights of the mountains, where, as he said, “They lighten their packs.” And up in those passes and high canyons, the hard-driven rubac of the traders’ caravans begin to stumble and tremble, perishing of exhaustion and cold. If a trader still tries to drive them on, people on the road unload them and loose them and let their own pack beast go with them. The little animals limp and scramble southward, back down to the desert. The goods they carried end up strewn along the wayside for anyone to take; but nobody takes anything, except a little food at need. They don’t want stuff to carry, to slow them down. Spring is coming, cool spring, sweet spring, to the valleys of grass and the forests, the lakes, the bright rivers of the north, and they want to be there when it comes.

  Listening to Kergemmeg, I imagined that if one could see the migration from above, see those people all threading along a thousand paths and trails, it would be like watching our northwest coast in spring a century or two ago when every stream, from the mile-wide Columbia to the tiniest creek, turned red with the salmon run.

  The salmon spawn and die when they reach their goal, and some of the Ansarac are going home to die, too: those on their third migration north, the three-year-olds, whom we would see as people of seventy and over. Some of them don’t make it all the way. Worn out by privation and hard going, they drop behind. If people pass an old man or woman sitting by the road, they may speak a word or two, help to put up a little shelter, leave a gift of food, but they do not urge the elder to come with them. If the elder is very weak or ill they may wait a night or two, until perhaps another migrant takes their place. If they find an old person dead by the roadside, they bury the body. On its back, with the feet to the north: going home.

  There are many, many graves along the roads north, Kergemmeg said. Nobody has ever made a fourth migration.

  The younger people, those on their first and second migrations, hurry on, crowded together in the high passes of the mountains, then spreading out ever wider on a myriad of paths through the prairies as the Middle Lands widen out north of the mountains. By the time they reach the northland proper, the great rivers of people have tasseled out into thousands of rivulets, veering west and east, across the north.

  Coming to a pleasant hill country where the grass is already green and the trees are leafing, one of the little groups comes to a halt. “Well, here we are,” says Mother. “Here it is.” There are tears in her eyes and she laughs the soft, clacking laugh of the Ansarac. “Shuku, do you remember this place?”

  And the daughter who was less than a half year old when she left this place—eleven or so, in our years—stares around with amazement and incredulity, and laughs, and cries, “But it was bigger than this!”

  Then perhaps Shuku looks across those half-familiar meadows of her birthplace to the just visible roof of the nearest neighbor and wonders if Kimimmid and his father, who caught up to them and camped with them for a few nights and then went on ahead, were there already, living there, and if so, would Kimimmid come over to say hello?

  For the people who lived so close-packed, in such sociable and ceaseless promiscuity in the Cities under the Sun, sharing rooms, sharing beds, sharing work and play, doing everything together in groups and crowds, now have all gone apart, family from family, friend from friend, each to a small and separate house here in the meadowlands, or farther north in the rolling hills, or still farther north in the lakelands. But if they have all scattered like sand from a broken hourglass, the bonds that unite them have not broken, only changed. Now they come together not in groups and crowds, not in tens and hundreds and thousands, but by two and two.

  “Well, here you are!” says Shuku’s mother, as Shuku’s father opens the door of the little house at the meadow’s edge. “You must have been just a few days ahead of us.”

  “Welcome home,” he says gravely. His eyes shine. The two adults take each other by the hand and slightly raise their narrow, beaked heads in a particular salute, an intimate yet formal greeting. Shuku suddenly remembers seeing them do that when she was a little girl, when they lived here, long ago. Here at the birthplace.

  “Kimimmid was asking about you just yesterday,” Father says to Shuku, and he softly clacks a laugh.

  Spring is coming, spring is upon them. Now they will perform the ceremonies of the spring.

  Kimimmid comes across the meadow to visit, and he and Shuku talk together, and walk together in the meadows and down by the stream. Presently, after a day or a week or two, he asks her if she would like to dance. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says, but seeing him stand tall and straight, his head thrown back a little, in the posture that begins the dance, she too stands up; at first her head is lowered, though she stands straight, arms at her sides; but then she wants to throw her head back, back, to reach her arms out wide, wide . . . to dance, to dance with him . . .

  And what are Shuku’s parents and Kimimmid’s parents doing, in the kitchen
garden or out in the old orchard, but the same thing? They face each other, they raise their proud and narrow heads, and then the man leaps, arms raised above his head, a great leap and a bow, a low bow . . . and the woman bows too . . . And so it goes, the courtship dance. All over the northern continent, now, the people are dancing.

  Nobody interferes with the older couples, recourting, refashioning their marriage. But Kimimmid had better look out. A young man comes across the meadow one evening, a young man Shuku never met before; his birthplace is some miles away. He has heard of Shuku’s beauty. He sits and talks with her. He tells her that he is building a new house, in a grove of trees, a pretty spot, nearer her home than his. He would like her advice on how to build the house. He would like very much to dance with her sometime. Maybe this evening, just for a little, just a step or two, before he goes away?

  He is a wonderful dancer. Dancing with him on the grass in the late evening of early spring, Shuku feels that she is flying on a great wind, and she closes her eyes, her hands float out from her sides as if on that wind, and meet his hands . . .

  Her parents will live together in the house by the meadow; they will have no more children, for that time is over for them, but they will make love as often as ever they did when they first were married. Shuku will choose one of her suitors, the new one, in fact. She goes to live with him and make love with him in the house they finish building together. Their building, their dancing, gardening, eating, sleeping, everything they do, turns into making love. And in due course Shuku is pregnant; and in due course she bears two babies. Each is born in a tough, white membrane or shell. Both parents tear this protective covering open with hands and beaks, freeing the tiny curled-up newborn, who lifts its infinitesimal beaklet and peeps blindly, already gaping, greedy for food, for life.

  The second baby, smaller, is not greedy, does not thrive. Though Shuku and her husband both feed her with tender care, and though Shuku’s mother comes to stay and feeds the little one from her own beak and rocks her endlessly when she cries, still she pines and weakens. One morning lying in her grandmother’s arms the infant twists and gasps for breath, and then is still. The grandmother weeps bitterly, remembering Shuku’s baby brother, who did not live even this long, and tries to comfort Shuku. The baby’s father digs a small grave out back of the new house, among the budding trees of the long springtime, and the tears fall from his eyes as he digs. But the other baby, the big girl, Kikirri, chirps and clacks and eats and thrives.

  About the time Kikirri is hauling herself upright and shouting “Da!” at her father and “Ma!” at her mother and grandmother and “No!” when told to stop what she is doing, Shuku has another baby. Like many second conceptions, it is a singleton. A fine boy, small, but greedy. He grows fast.

  He will be the last of Shuku’s children. She and her husband will make love still, whenever they please, in all the delight and ease of the time of flowering and the time of fruit, in the warm days and the mild nights, in the cool under the trees and out in the buzzing heat of the meadow in summer noontime, but it will be, as they say, luxury love; nothing will come of it but love itself.

  Children are born to the Ansarac only in the early northern spring, soon after they have returned to their birthplace. Some couples bring up four children, and many three; but often, if the first two thrive, there is no second conception.

  “You are spared our curse of overbreeding,” I said to Kergemmeg when he had told me all this. And he agreed, when I told him a little about my plane.

  But he did not want me to think that an Ansar has no sexual or reproductive choice at all. Pair bonding is the rule, but human will and contrariness change and bend and break it, and he talked about those exceptions. Many pair bonds are between two men or two women. Such couples and others who are childless are often given a baby by a couple who have three or four, or take on an orphaned child and bring it up. There are people who take no mate and people who take several mates at one time or in sequence. There is of course adultery. And there is rape. It is bad to be a girl among the last migrants coming up from the south, for the sexual drive is already strong in such stragglers, and young women are all too often gang-raped and arrive at their birthplace brutalised, mateless, and pregnant. A man who finds no mate or is dissatisfied with his wife may leave home and go off as a peddler of needles and thread or as a tool sharpener and tinker; such wanderers are welcomed for their goods but mistrusted as to their motives.

  When we had talked together through several of those glimmering purple evenings on the veranda in the soft sea breeze, I asked Kergemmeg about his own life. He had followed Madan, the rule, the Way, in all respects but one, he said. He mated after his first migration north. His wife bore two children, both from the first conception, a girl and a boy, who of course went south with them in due time. The whole family rejoined for his second migration north, and both children had married close by, so that he knew his five grandchildren well. He and his wife had spent most of their third season in the south in different cities; she, a teacher of astronomy, had gone farther south to the Observatory, while he stayed in Terke Keter to study with a group of philosophers. She died very suddenly of a heart attack. He attended her funeral. Soon after that he made the trek back north with his son and grandchildren. “I didn’t miss her till I came back home,” he said, factually. “But to come there to our house, to live there without her—that wasn’t something I could do. I happened to hear that someone was needed to greet the strangers on this island. I had been thinking about the best way to die, and this seemed a sort of halfway point. An island in the middle of the ocean, with not another soul of my people on it . . . not quite life, not quite death. The idea amused me. So I am here.” He was well over three Ansar years old; getting on for eighty in our years, though only the slight stoop of his shoulders and the pure silver of his crest showed his age.

  The next night he told me about the southern migration, describing how a man of the Ansarac feels as the warm days of the northern summer begin to wane and shorten. All the work of harvest is done, the grain stored in airtight bins for next year, the slow-growing edible roots planted to winter through and be ready in the spring; the children are shooting up tall, active, increasingly restless and bored by life on the homeplace, more and more inclined to wander off and make friends with the neighbors’ children. Life is sweet here but the same, always the same, and luxury love has lost its urgency. One night, a cloudy night with a chill in the air, your wife in bed next to you sighs and murmurs, “You know? I miss the city.” And it comes back to you in a great wave of light and warmth—the crowds, the deep streets and high houses packed with people, the Year Tower high above it all—the sports arenas blazing with sunlight, the squares at night full of lantern lights and music where you sit at the café tables and drink ü and talk and talk halfway to morning—the old friends, friends you haven’t thought of all this time—and strangers—how long has it been since you saw a new face? How long since you heard a new idea, had a new thought? Time for the city, time to follow the sun!

  “Dear,” the mother says, “we can’t take all your rock collection south, just pick out the most special ones,” and the child protests, “But I’ll carry them! I promise!” Forced at last to yield, she finds a special, secret place for her rocks till she comes back, never imagining that by next year, when she comes back home, she won’t care about her childish rock collection, and scarcely aware that she has begun to think constantly of the great journey and the unknown lands ahead. The city! What do you do in the city? Are there rock collections?

  “Yes,” Father says. “In the museum. Very fine collections. They’ll take you to see all the museums when you’re in school.” School?

  “You’ll love it,” Mother says with absolute certainty.

  “School is the best good time in the world,” says Aunt Kekki. “I loved school so much, I think I’m going to teach school, this year.”

  The migration south is quite a different matter from
the migration north. It is not a scattering but a grouping, a gathering. It is not haphazard but orderly, planned by all the families of a region for many days beforehand. They set off together, five or ten or fifteen families, and camp together at night. They bring plenty of food with them in handcarts and barrows, cooking utensils, fuel for fires in the treeless plains, warm clothing for the mountain passes, and medicines for illness along the way.

  There are no old people on the southward migration—nobody over seventy or so in our years. Those who have made three migrations stay behind. They group together in farmsteads or the small towns that have grown around the farmsteads, or they live out the end of their life with their mate, or alone, in the house where they lived the springs and summers of their lives. (I think what Kergemmeg meant, when he said he had followed his people’s Way in all ways but one, was that he had not stayed home but had come to the island.) The “winter parting,” as it is called, between the young going south and the old staying home is painful. It is stoical. It is as it must be.

  Only those who stay behind will ever see the glory of autumn in the northern lands, the blue length of dusk, the first faint patterns of ice on the lake. Some have made paintings or left letters describing these things for the children and grandchildren they will not see again. Most die before the long, long darkness and cold of winter. None survive it.

  Each migrating group, as it comes down towards the Middle Lands, is joined by others coming from east and west, till at night the twinkle of campfires covers the great prairie from horizon to horizon. The people sing at the campfires, and the quiet singing hovers in the darkness between the little fires and the stars.

  They don’t hurry on the southward journey. They drift along easily, not far each day, though they keep moving. As they reach the foothills of the mountains, the great masses split again onto many different paths, thinning out, for it’s pleasanter to be few on a trail than to come after great numbers of people and trudge in the dust and litter they leave. Up in the heights and passes where there are only a few ways to go, they have to come together again. They make the best of it, with cheerful greetings and offers to share food, fire, shelter. Everyone is kind to the children, the half-year-olds, who find the steep mountain paths hard going and often frightening; they slow their pace for the children.