Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  And one evening when it seems they have been struggling in the mountains forever, they come through a high, stony pass to the outlook—South Face, or the Godsbeak Rocks, or the Tor. There they stand and look out and out and down and down to the golden, sunlit levels of the south, the endless fields of wild grain, and some far, faint, purple smudges—the walls and towers of the Cities under the Sun.

  On the downhill road they go faster, and eat lighter, and the dust of their going is a great cloud behind them.

  They come to the cities—there are nine of them; Terke Keter is the largest—standing full of sand and silence and sunlight. They pour in through the gates and doors, they fill the streets, they light the lanterns, they draw water from the brimming wells, they throw their bedding down in empty rooms, they shout from window to window and from roof to roof.

  Life in the cities is so different from life in the homesteads that the children can’t believe it; they are disturbed and dubious; they disapprove. It is so noisy, they complain. It’s hot. There isn’t anywhere to be alone, they say. They weep, the first nights, from homesickness. But they go off to school as soon as the schools are organised, and there they meet everybody else their age, all of them disturbed and dubious and disapproving and shy and eager and wild with excitement. Back home, they all learned to read and write and do arithmetic, just as they learned carpentry and farming, taught by their parents; but here are advanced classes, libraries, museums, galleries of art, concerts of music, teachers of art, of literature, of mathematics, of astronomy, of architecture, of philosophy—here are sports of all kinds, games, gymnastics, and somewhere in the city every night there is a round dance—above all, here is everybody else in the world, all crowded into these yellow walls, all meeting and talking and working and thinking together in an endless ferment of mind and occupation.

  The parents seldom stay together in the cities. Life there is not lived by twos but in groups. They drift apart, following friends, pursuits, professions, and see each other now and then. The children stay at first with one parent or the other, but after a while they too want to be on their own and go off to live in one of the warrens of young people, the communal houses, the dormitories of the colleges. Young men and women live together, as do grown men and women. Gender is not of much import where there is no sexuality.

  For they do everything under the sun in the Cities under the Sun, except make love.

  They love, they hate, they learn, they make, they think hard, work hard, play; they enjoy passionately and suffer desperately, they live a full and human life, and they never give a thought to sex—unless, as Kergemmeg said with a perfect poker face, they are philosophers.

  Their achievements, their monuments as a people, are all in the Cities under the Sun, whose towers and public buildings, as I saw in a book of drawings Kergemmeg showed me, vary from stern purity to fervent magnificence. Their books are written there, their thought and religion took form there over the centuries. Their history, their continuity as a culture, is all there.

  Their continuity as living beings is what they see to in the north.

  Kergemmeg said that while they are in the south they do not miss their sexuality at all. I had to take him at his word, which was given, hard as it might be for us to imagine, simply as a statement of fact.

  And as I try to tell here what he told me, it seems wrong to describe their life in the cities as celibate or chaste: for those words imply a forced or willed resistance to desire. Where there is no desire there is no resistance, no abstinence, but rather what one might call, in a radical sense of the word, innocence. Their marital life is an empty memory to them, meaningless. If a couple stays together or meets often in the south it is because they are uncommonly good friends—because they love each other. But they love their other friends too. They never live separately from other people. There is little privacy in the great apartment houses of the cities—nobody cares about it. Life there is communal, active, sociable, gregarious, and full of pleasures.

  But slowly the days grow warmer, the air drier; there is a restlessness in the air. The shadows begin to fall differently. And the crowds gather in the streets to hear the Year Priests announce the solstice and watch the sun stop, and pause, and turn south.

  People leave the cities, one here, a couple there, a family there . . . It has begun to stir again, that soft hormonal buzz in the blood, that first vague yearning intimation or memory, the body’s knowledge of its kingdom coming.

  The young people follow that knowledge blindly, without knowing they know it. The married couples are drawn back together by all their wakened memories, intensely sweet. To go home, to go home and be there together!

  All they learned and did all those thousands of days and nights in the cities is left behind them, packed up, put away. Till they come back south again . . .

  “That is why it was easy to turn us aside,” Kergemmeg said. “Because our lives in the north and the south are so different that they seem, to you others, incoherent, incomplete. And we cannot connect them rationally. We cannot explain or justify our Madan to those who live only one kind of life. When the Bayderac came to our plane, they told us our Way was mere instinct and that we lived like animals. We were ashamed.”

  (I later checked Kergemmeg’s “Bayderac” in the Encyclopedia Planaria, where I found an entry for the Beidr, of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean “of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.”)

  Kergemmeg spoke of them with a kind of pain. It changed his voice, tightened it. He had been a child when they arrived—the first visitors, as it happened, from another plane. He had thought about them the rest of his life.

  “They told us we should take control of our lives. We should not live two separate half lives but live fully all the time, all the year, as all intelligent beings do. They were a great people, full of knowledge, with high sciences and great ease and luxury of life. To them we truly were little more than animals. They told us and showed us how other people lived on other planes. We saw we were foolish to do without the pleasure of sex for half our life. We saw we were foolish to spend so much time and energy going between south and north on foot, when we could make ships, or roads and cars, or airplanes, and go back and forth a hundred times a year if we liked. We saw we could build cities in the north and make homesteads in the south. Why not? Our Madan was wasteful and irrational, a mere animal impulse controlling us. All we had to do to be free of it was take the medicines the Bayderac gave us. And our children need not take medicines, but could have their being altered by the genetic science of Bayder. Then we could be without rest from sexual desire until we got very old, like the Bayderac. And then a woman would be able to get pregnant at any time before her menopause—in the south, even. And the number of her children would not be limited . . . They were eager to give us these medicines. We knew their doctors were wise. As soon as they came to us, they had given us treatments for some of our illnesses that cured people as if by a miracle. They knew so much. We saw them fly about in their airplanes, and envied them, and were ashamed.

  “They brought machines for us. We tried to drive the cars they gave us on our narrow, rocky roads. They sent engineers to direct us, and we began to build a huge highway straight through the Middle Lands. We blew up mountains with the explosives the Bayderac gave us so the highway could run wide and level, south to north and north to south. My father was a workman on the highway. There were thousands of men working on that road, for a while. Men from the southern homesteads . . . Only men. Women were not asked to go and do that work. Bayder women did not do such work. Women were to stay home with the children, they told us, while men did the work.”

  Kergemmeg sipped his ü thoughtfully and gazed off at the glimmering sea and the star-dusted sky.
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  “Women went down from the homesteads and talked to the men,” he said. “They said to listen to them, not only to the Bayderac . . . Perhaps women don’t feel shame the way men do. Perhaps their shame is different, more a matter of the body than the mind. They didn’t care much for the cars and airplanes and bulldozers but cared a great deal about the medicines that would change us and the rules about who did which kind of work. After all, with us, the woman bears the child, but both parents feed it, both nurture it. Why should a child be left to the mother only? They asked that. How could a woman alone bring up four children? Or more than four children? It was inhuman. And then, in the cities, why should families stay together? The child doesn’t want its parents then, the parents don’t want the child, they all have other things to do . . . The women talked about this to us men, and with them we tried to talk about it to the Bayderac.

  “They said, ‘All that will change. You will see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your hormones, your genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you will be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns.’

  “We answered, ‘But will we be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns?’

  “Men working on the highway began throwing down their tools and abandoning the big machines the Bayderac had provided. They said, ‘What do we need this highway for when we have a thousand ways of our own?’ And they set off southward on those old paths and trails.

  “You see, all this happened—fortunately, I think—near the end of a northern season. In the north, where we all live apart, and so much of life is spent in courting and making love and bringing up the children, we were—how shall I put it—more shortsighted, more impressionable, more vulnerable. We had just begun the drawing together, then. When we came to the south, when we were all in the Cities under the Sun, we could gather, take counsel together, argue and listen to arguments, and consider what was best for us as a people.

  “After we had done that, and had talked further with the Bayderac and let them talk to us, we called for a Great Consensus, such as is spoken of in the legends and the ancient records of the Year Towers where history is kept. Every Ansar came to the Year Tower of their city and voted on this choice: Shall we follow the Bayder Way or the Manad? If we followed their Way, they were to stay among us; if we chose our own, they were to go. We chose our Way.” His beak clattered very softly as he laughed. “I was a half-yearling, that season. I cast my vote.”

  I did not have to ask how he had voted, but I asked if the Bayderac had been willing to go.

  “Some of them argued, some of them threatened,” he said. “They talked about their wars and their weapons. I am sure they could have destroyed us utterly. But they did not. Maybe they despised us so much they didn’t want to bother. Or their wars called them away. By then we had been visited by people from the Interplanary Agency, and most likely it was their doing that the Bayderac left us in peace. Enough of us had been alarmed that we agreed then, in another voting, that we wanted no more visitors. So now the Agency sees to it that they come only to this island. I am not sure we made the right choice, there. Sometimes I think we did, sometimes I wonder. Why are we afraid of other peoples, other Ways? They can’t all be like the Bayderac.”

  “I think you made the right choice,” I said. “But I say it against my will. I’d like so much to meet an Ansar woman, to meet your children, to see the Cities under the Sun! I’d like so much to see your dancing!”

  “Oh, well, that you can see,” he said, and stood up. Maybe we had had a little more ü than usual, that night.

  He stood very tall there in the glimmering darkness on the veranda over the beach. He straightened his shoulders, and his head went back. The crest on his head slowly rose into a stiff plume, silver in the starlight. He lifted his arms above his head. It was the pose of the antique Spanish dancer, fiercely elegant, tense, and masculine. He did not leap, he was after all a man of eighty, but he gave somehow the impression of a leap, then a deep graceful bow. His beak clicked out a quick double rhythm, he stamped twice, and his feet seemed to flicker in a complex set of steps while his upper body remained taut and straight. Then his arms came out in a great embracing gesture, towards me, as I sat almost terrified by the beauty and intensity of his dance.

  And then he stopped, and laughed. He was out of breath. He sat down and passed his hand over his forehead and his crest, panting a little. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t courting season.”

  Social Dreaming of the Frin

  NOTE: Much of the information for this piece comes from An Oneirological Survey on the Frinthian Plane, published by Mills College Press, and from conversations with Frinthian scholars and friends.

  On the Frinthian plane, dreams are not private property. A troubled Frin has no need to lie on a couch recounting dreams to a psychoanalyst, for the doctor already knows what the patient dreamed last night, because the doctor dreamed it too; and the patient also dreamed what the doctor dreamed; and so did everyone else in the neighborhood.

  To escape from the dreams of others or to have a private, a secret dream, the Frin must go out alone into the wilderness. And even in the wilderness, their sleep may be invaded by the strange dream visions of lions, antelope, bears, or mice.

  While awake, and during much of their sleep, the Frin are as dream-deaf as we are. Only sleepers who are in or approaching REM sleep can participate in the dreams of others also in REM sleep.

  REM is an acronym for “rapid eye movement,” a visible accompaniment of this stage of sleep; its signal in the brain is a characteristic type of electroencephalic wave. Most of our rememberable dreams occur during REM sleep.

  Frinthian REM sleep and that of people on our plane yield very similar EEG traces, though there are some significant differences, in which may lie the key to the Frinthian ability to share dreams.

  To share, the dreamers must be fairly close to one another. The carrying power of the average Frinthian dream is about that of the average human voice. A dream can be received easily within a hundred-meter radius, and bits and fragments of it may carry a good deal farther. A strong dream in a solitary place may well carry for two kilometers or even farther.

  In a lonely farmhouse a Frin’s dreams mingle only with those of the rest of the family, along with echoes, whiffs, and glimpses of what the cattle in the barn and the dog dozing on the doorstop hear, smell, and see in their sleep.

  In a village or town, with people asleep in all the houses around, the Frin spend at least part of every night in a shifting phantasmagoria of their own and other people’s dreams which I find hard to imagine.

  I asked an acquaintance in a small town to tell me any dreams she could recall from the past night. At first she demurred, saying that they’d all been nonsense, and only “strong” dreams ought to be thought about and talked over. She was evidently reluctant to tell me, an outsider, things that had been going on in her neighbors’ heads. I managed at last to convince her that my interest was genuine and not voyeuristic. She thought a while and said, “Well, there was a woman—it was me in the dream, or sort of me, but I think it was the mayor’s wife’s dream, actually, they live at the corner—this woman, anyhow, and she was trying to find a baby that she’d had last year. She had put the baby into a dresser drawer and forgotten all about it, and now I was, she was, feeling worried about it—Had it had anything to eat? Since last year? Oh my word, how stupid we are in dreams! And then, oh, yes, then there was an awful argument between a naked man and a dwarf, they were in an empty cistern. That may have been my own dream, at least to start with. Because I know that cistern. It was on my grandfather’s farm where I used to stay when I was a child. But they both turned into lizards, I think. And then—oh yes!” She laughed. “I was being squashed by a pair of giant breasts, huge ones, with pointy nipples. I think that was the teenage boy next door, because I was terrified but kind of ecstatic, too. And what else was there? Oh, a mouse, it looked so delicious, and it di
dn’t know I was there, and I was just about to pounce, but then there was a horrible thing, a nightmare—a face without any eyes—and huge, hairy hands groping at me—and then I heard the three-year-old next door screaming, because I woke up too. That poor child has so many nightmares, she drives us all crazy. Oh, I don’t really like thinking about that one. I’m glad we forget most dreams. Wouldn’t it be awful if we had to remember them all!”

  Dreaming is a cyclical, not a continuous, activity, and so in small communities there are hours when one’s sleep theater, if one may call it so, is dark. REM sleep among settled, local groups of Frin tends to synchronise. As the cycles peak, about five times a night, several or many dreams may be going on simultaneously in everybody’s head, intermingling and influencing one another with their mad, inarguable logic, so that (as my friend in the village described it) the baby turns up in the cistern and the mouse hides between the breasts, while the eyeless monster disappears in the dust kicked up by a pig trotting past through a new dream, perhaps a dog’s, since the pig is rather dimly seen but is smelled with great particularity. But after such episodes comes a period when everyone can sleep in peace, without anything exciting happening at all.

  In Frinthian cities, where one may be within dream range of hundreds of people every night, the layering and overlap of insubstantial imagery is, I’m told, so continual and so confusing that the dreams cancel out, like brushfuls of colors slapped one over the other without design; even one’s own dream blurs at once into the meaningless commotion, as if projected on a screen where a hundred films are already being shown, their soundtracks all running together. Only occasionally does a gesture, a voice, ring clear for a moment, or a particularly vivid wet dream or ghastly nightmare cause all the sleepers in a neighborhood to sigh, ejaculate, shudder, or wake up with a gasp.