Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  And so, when the novelty of the annual Addition and Supplements at last wears thin, the royal guests at the royal parties can always fall back on discussing degrees of consanguinity, settling such questions as whether the son born of Agnin IV’s second marriage, to Tivand of Shut, was or was not the same prince who was slain at the age of thirteen defending his father’s palace against the Anti-Agnates and therefore could, or could not, have been the father of the Duke of Vigrign, later King of Shut.

  Such questions are not of interest to everyone, and the placid fanaticism with which the Hegnish pursue them bores or offends many visitors to their plane. The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so.

  They do not, however, have to think about foreigners. That is taken care of for them. The Interplanary Hotel on Hegn is in Hemgogn, a beautiful little kingdom on the west coast. The Interplanary Agency runs the hotel and hires local guides. The guides, mostly dukes and earls, take visitors to see the Alternation of the Watch on the Walls, performed by princes of the blood, wearing magnificent traditional regalia, at noon and six daily. The Agency also offers day tours to a couple of other kingdoms. The bus runs softly along the ancient, indestructible roads among sunlit orchards and wildfood forests. The tourists get out of the bus and look at the ruins, or walk through the parts of the palace open to visitors. The inhabitants of the palace are aloof but unfailingly civil and courteous, as befits royalty. Perhaps the Queen comes down and smiles at the tourists without actually looking at them and instructs the pretty little Crown Princess to invite them to pick and eat whatever they like in the lunch orchard, and then she and the Princess go back into the private part of the palace, and the tourists have lunch and get back into the bus. And that is that.

  Being an introvert, I rather like Hegn. One does not have to mingle, since one can’t. And the food is good, and the sunlight sweet. I went there more than once, and stayed longer than most people do, and so it happened that I learned about the Hegnish Commoners.

  I was walking down the main street of Legners Royal, the capital of Hemgogn, when I saw a crowd in the square in front of the old Church of the Thrice Royal Martyr. I thought it must be one of the many annual festivals or rituals and joined the crowd to watch. These events are always slow, decorous, and profoundly dull. But they’re the only events there are; and they have their own tedious charm. Soon, however, I saw this was a funeral. And it was altogether different from any Hegnish ceremony I had ever witnessed, above all in the behavior of the people.

  They were all royals, of course, like any crowd in Hegn, all of them princes, dukes, earls, princesses, duchesses, countesses, etc. But they were not behaving with the regal reserve, the sovereign aplomb, the majestic apathy I had always seen in them before. They were standing about in the square, for once not engaged in any kind of prescribed ritual duty or traditional occupation or hobby, but just crowding together, as if for comfort. They were disturbed, distressed, disorganised, and verged upon being noisy. They showed emotion. They were grieving, openly grieving.

  The person nearest me in the crowd was the Dowager Duchess of Mogn and Farstis, the Queen’s aunt by marriage. I knew who she was because I had seen her, every morning at half past eight, issue forth from the Royal Palace to walk the King’s pet gorki in the palace gardens, which border on the hotel. One of the Agency guides had told me who she was. I had watched from the window of the breakfast room of the hotel while the gorki, a fine, heavily testicled specimen, relieved himself under the cheeseblossom bushes, and the Dowager Duchess gazed away into a tranquil vacancy reserved for the eyes of true aristocrats.

  But now those pale eyes were filled with tears, and the soft, weathered face of the Duchess worked with the effort to control her feelings.

  “Your ladyship,” I said, hoping that the translatomat would provide the proper appellation for a duchess in case I had it wrong, “forgive me, I am from another country, whose funeral is this?”

  She looked at me unseeing, dimly surprised but too absorbed in sorrow to wonder at my ignorance or my effrontery. “Sissie’s,” she said, and speaking the name made her break into open sobs for a moment. She turned away, hiding her face in her large lace handkerchief, and I dared ask no more.

  The crowd was growing rapidly, constantly. By the time the coffin was borne forth from the church, there must have been over a thousand people, most of the population of Legners, all of them members of the Royal Family, crowded into the square. The King and his two sons and his brother followed the coffin at a respectful distance.

  The coffin was carried and closely surrounded by people I had never seen before, a very odd lot—pale, fat men in cheap suits, pimply boys, middle-aged women with brassy hair and stiletto heels, and a highly visible young woman with thick thighs. She wore a miniskirt, a halter top, and a black cotton lace mantilla. She staggered along after the coffin, weeping aloud, half hysterical, supported on one side by a scared-looking man with a pencil mustache and two-tone shoes, on the other by a small, dry, tired, dogged woman in her seventies dressed entirely in rusty black.

  At the far edge of the crowd I saw a native guide with whom I had struck up a lightweight friendship, a young viscount, son of the Duke of Ist, and I worked my way towards him. It took quite a while, as everyone was streaming along with the slow procession of the coffin bearers and their entourage towards the King’s limousines and horse-drawn coaches that waited near the palace gates. When I finally got to the guide, I said, “Who is it? Who are they?”

  “Sissie,” he said almost in a wail, caught up in the general grief—“Sissie died last night!” Then, coming back to his duties as guide and interpreter and trying to regain his pleasant aristocratic manner, he looked at me, blinked back his tears, and said, “They’re our commoners.”

  “And Sissie—?”

  “She’s, she was, their daughter. The only daughter.” Do what he could, the tears would well into his eyes. “She was such a dear girl. Such a help to her mother, always. Such a sweet smile. And there’s nobody like her, nobody. She was the only one. Oh, she was so full of love. Our poor little Sissie!” And he broke right down and cried aloud.

  At this moment the King and his sons and brother passed quite close to us. I saw that both the boys were weeping, and that the King’s stony face betrayed a superhuman effort to maintain calm. His slightly retarded brother appeared to be in a daze, holding tight to the King’s arm and walking beside him like an automaton.

  The crowd poured after the funeral procession. People pushed in closer, trying to touch the fringes of the white silk pall over the coffin. “Sissie! Sissie!” voices cried. “Oh, Mother, we loved her too!” they cried. “Dad, Dad, what are we going to do without her? She’s with the angels,” the voices cried. “Don’t cry, Mother, we love you! We’ll always love you! Oh Sissie! Sissie! Our own sweet girl!”

  Slowly, hampered, almost prevented by the passionate protestations of the immense royal family gathered about it, the coffin and its attendants reached the coaches and cars. When the coffin was slid into the back of the long white hearse, a quavering, inhuman moan went up from every throat. Noblewomen screamed in thin, high voices and noblemen fainted away. The girl in the miniskirt fell into what looked like an epileptic fit, foaming at the mouth, but she recovered quite quickly, and one of the fat, pale men shoved her into a limousine.

  The engines of the cars purred, the coachmen stirred up their handsome white horses, and the cortege set off, slowly still, at a foot pace. The crowd poured after it.

  I went back to the hotel. I learned that evening that most of the population of the city of Legners Royal had followed the cortege all the way, six miles, to the graveyard, and stood through the burial service and the inhumation. All through the evening, la
te at night, people were still straggling back towards the palace and the royal apartments, weary, footsore, tear-stained.

  During the next few days I talked with the young viscount, who was able to explain to me the phenomenon I had witnessed. I had understood that all the people in the Kingdom of Hemgogn were of royal blood, directly related to its (and other) kings; what I had not known was that there was one family who were not royal. They were common. Their name was Gat.

  That surname, and Mrs. Gat’s maiden name, Tugg, went entirely unmentioned in the Book of the Blood. No Gat or Tugg had ever married anybody royal or even noble. There was no family legend about a handsome young prince who seduced the fair daughter of the bootmaker. There were no family legends. There was no family history. The Gats didn’t know where they came from or how long they had lived in the kingdom. They were bootmakers by trade. Few people in sunny Hegn ever wear boots. As his father had done, and as his son was learning to do, Mr. Gat made dressy leather boots for the Princes of the Watch, and ugly felt boots for the Queen Mother, who liked to walk in the smallmeat meadows in winter with her gorkis. Uncle Agby knew how to tan leather. Aunt Irs knew how to felt wool. Great-Aunt Yoly raised sheep. Cousin Fafvig ate far too many grapes and was drunk most of the time. The eldest daughter, Chickie, was a bit wild, though good at heart. And Sissie, sweet Sissie, the younger daughter, had been the kingdom’s darling, the Wild Flower of Hemgogn, the Little Common Girl.

  She had always been delicate. The story was that she had fallen in love with young Prince Frodig, though he of course could never have married her. It was said they had been seen talking, once, more than once, near the Palace Bridge at twilight. My viscount clearly wanted to believe this but found it difficult, since Prince Frodig had been out of the country, at school in Halfvig, for three years. At any rate, Sissie had a weak chest. “The commoners often do,” the viscount said, “it’s hereditary. Runs in the female line.” She had gone into a decline, grown wan and pale, never complaining, always smiling but so thin and quiet, just faded away, from day to day, until she lay, in the cold cold clay, Sweet Sissie, the Wild Flower of Hemgogn.

  And the whole kingdom mourned her. They mourned her wildly, extravagantly, unconsolably, royally. The King had wept at her open grave. Just before they began to shovel in the earth, the Queen had laid on Sissie’s coffin the diamond brooch that had come down to her, mother to daughter, for seventeen generations from Erbinrasa of the North, a jewel that no hand had ever touched that was not of the blood of the Erbinnas. Now it lay in the grave of the Little Common Girl. “It was not as bright as her eyes,” the Queen said.

  I had to leave Hegn not long after this funeral. Other travels absorbed me for three or four years, and when I went back to the Kingdom of Hemgogn, the orgy of grief was long over. I looked up my viscount. He had given up playing at being a guide upon coming into his inheritance: the title of Duke of Ist and an apartment in the New Wing of the Royal Palace, with usufruct of one of the Royal Vineyards, which furnished grapes for his parties.

  He was a nice young man, with a faint strain of originality in him that had led him to his avocation as a guide; he was actually well disposed towards foreigners. He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the month I stayed in Hemgogn.

  It was then that I discovered the other subject of conversation in Hegn—the topic that could eclipse sports, gorkis, the weather, and even consanguinity.

  The Tuggs and the Gats, of whom there were nineteen or twenty at that time, were of inexhaustible, absorbing interest to the royalty of Hemgogn. Children made scrapbooks about them. The Viscount’s mother had a cherished mug and plate bearing portraits of “Mother” and “Dad” Gat on their wedding day, surrounded by gilt scrolls. Rather amateurish mimeographed reports of the Common Family’s doings and snapshots of them made by the royals of Hemgogn were enormously popular not only throughout the kingdom but also in the neighboring kingdoms of Drohe and Vigmards, neither of which had a family of commoners. The larger neighboring reign to the south, Odboy, had three common families and an actual, living wastrel, called the Old Tramp of Odboy. Yet even there, gossip about the Gats, how short Chickie’s skirts were, how long Mother Tugg seethed her underwear, whether Uncle Agby had a tumor or only a boil, whether Auntie and Uncle Bod were going to the seashore for a week in summer or an excursion to the Vigmards Hills in autumn—all this was discussed almost as eagerly in Odboy as in the commonerless kingdoms or Hemgogn itself. And a portrait of Sissie wearing a crown of wildflowers, made from a snapshot that was said to have been taken by Prince Frodig, though Chickie insisted that she had taken it, adorned the walls of a thousand rooms in a dozen palaces.

  I met a few royals who did not share the general adoration. Old Prince Foford took rather a liking to me, foreigner as I was. The King’s first cousin and my friend the Duke’s uncle, he prided himself on his unconventionality, his radical thinking. “Rebel of the Family, they call me,” he said in his growly voice, his eyes twinkling among wrinkles. He raised flennis, not gorkis, and had no patience at all with the Commoners, not even Sissie. “Weak,” he growled, “no stamina. No breeding. Flaunted herself about under the walls, hoping the Prince’d see her. Caught cold, died of it. Whole lot of ’em sickly. Sickly, ignorant beggars. Filthy houses. Put on a show, that’s all they know how to do. Dirt, screeching, flinging pots, black eyes, foul language—all show. All humbug. Couple of dukes in that woodpile, back a generation or two. Know it for a fact.”

  And indeed, as I took notice of the gossip, the bulletins, the photographs, and of the Commoners themselves as they went about the streets of Legners Royal, they did seem rather insistently, even blatantly lower-class: professional is perhaps the term I want. No doubt Chickie had not deliberately planned to be impregnated by her uncle, but when she was, she certainly made the most of it. She would tell any prince or princess with a notebook the woeful tale of how Uncle Tugg had squashed halfrotted grapes into her mouth till she was vomiting drunk and then tore off her clothes and screwed her. The story grew with the telling, getting more and more steamy and explicit. It was the thirteen-year-old Prince Hodo who wrote down Chickie’s vivid words concerning the brutal weight of Uncle Tugg’s hairy body and how even as she fought him her own body betrayed her, her nipples hardening and her thighs parting as he forced his, and here the prince put four asterisks, into her four asterisks. To one of the younger duchesses Chickie confessed that she had tried to get rid of the baby but hot baths were a bunch of crap and Grandma’s herbs were a load of shit and you could kill yourself with knitting needles. Meanwhile Uncle Tugg went around boasting that the family had always called him Fuckemall, until his brother-in-law, Chickie’s putative father (there was a good deal of doubt concerning Chickie’s parentage, and Uncle Tugg himself may have been her father), lay in wait for him, attacked him from behind with a piece of lead pipe, and beat him senseless. The entire kingdom shuddered voluptuously when Uncle Tugg was discovered lying in a pool of blood and urine at the door of the family outhouse.

  For the Gats and Tuggs had no plumbing, no running water, no electricity. The previous queen, in a misplaced fit of compassion or noblesse oblige, had had wiring installed in the main house of the ancient, filthy warren of hovels and sheds called the Commons, where snot-nosed urchins played in gutted automobiles and huge dogs lunged on short chains in endless frenzies of barking, trying to attack Great-Aunt Yoly’s mangy sheep that wandered about among the stinking vats of Uncle Agby’s tannery. The boys broke all the lightbulbs with their slingshots the first day. Gamma Gat would never use the electric oven, preferring to roast her breadfruit in the cavernous woodstove. Mice and rats ate the insulation and shorted out the circuits. The principal result of the electrification of the Commons was a lingering stink of fried rat.

  As a rule the Commoners avoided foreigners with blank inattention, just as the royals did.
Now and then their patriotic bigotry boiled up and they threw garbage at tourists. Informed of this, the Palace always issued a brief statement of shock and dismay that Hegnishmen should so forget the hospitable traditions of the kingdom. But at the royal parties there was often a little satisfied sniggering and murmurs of “Gave the beggars a bit of their own, eh?” For after all, tourists were commoners; but they weren’t our commoners.

  Our commoners had picked up one foreign habit. They all smoked American cigarettes from the age of six or seven, and had yellow fingers, bad breath, and horrible phlegmy coughs. Cousin Cadge, one of the fat, pale men I had seen at the funeral, ran a profitable cigarette-smuggling business through his dwarfish son Stumpy, who was employed to clean toilets at the Interplanary Hotel. Young royals often bought cigarettes from Cadge and smoked them in secret, relishing the nausea, the nastiness, the sense of being for a few minutes real vulgarians, genuine scum.

  I left before Chickie’s baby was born, but royal attention was already centered on the coming event, and was only heightened by Chickie’s frequent public announcements that she was sure the little bastard would be a drooling idiot born without any arms or legs or four asterisks, what else could you expect. And the royal families of four kingdoms did not want to expect anything else. Fascinated, appalled, they looked forward to a genetic disaster, a tiny, monstrous plebeian to cluck and sigh and shudder over. I am sure Chickie did her duty and provided them one.