Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Supersmarts obeyed direct, simple orders, erratically. If told, “Go to the kitchen,” or “Sit down,” they often did so. If asked “Are you hungry?,” a child might or might not go to the kitchen or to the table to receive food. When hurt, none of the children would run to an adult crying about the “owie.” They just crouched down, whimpering or silent. A father said, “It’s like he doesn’t know it happened to him, like something happened but he doesn’t know it happened to him.” He added proudly, “He’s tough. A real soldier. Never asks for help.”

  Spoken endearments seemed to mean nothing to the children, though if offered a physical embrace they might nuzzle or cuddle up to the speaker. Sometimes a child would say or hum endearments—“Nice nice nice,” “Mama soft, mama soft”—but not in response to loving words from the parent. They responded to their names, and most of them if asked their name would say it, though some did not. The parents reported that they increasingly seemed to “just talk to themselves” or “just don’t listen” and that their use of pronouns was often arbitrary—“you” for “I,” or “me” for “them.” All their speech seemed to be increasingly spontaneous not responsive, random not purposive.

  After over a year of patient and intensive study and discussion, the investigators published their report. Its language was very cautious. They put a good deal of emphasis on the case of Ra Gna, who had continued to sleep up to an hour a night and even occasionally to doze off in the daytime, and was thus considered, in terms of the experiment, a failure. Ra Gna’s difference from the other Supersmarts was vividly and unguardedly described by one of the investigators to a homescreen reporter: “She’s a sweet kid, dreamy. They’re all dreamy. She wanders off, I mean her mind does; talking to her is kind of like talking to the dog, you know? She sort of listens, but most of it’s just noise to her. But sometimes she sort of shivers like somebody waking up, and then she’s there, and she knows it. None of the other kids ever do. They aren’t there. They aren’t anywhere.”

  The conclusion of the investigators was that “permanent wakefulness appears to prevent the brain from achieving full consciousness.”

  The media screamed with gusto for a month about Zombie Tots—the Waking Brain-Dead—Programmed Autism—Infant Sacrifice on Altar of Science—“Why Won’t They Let Me Sleep, Mommy?”—and then lost interest.

  The government’s interest was kept alive for twelve more years by the unflagging persuasion of Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug, who had firm allies in one of the Supreme Pinnacular’s most valued advisers and several influential generals of the army. Then, abruptly and without public notice, funding for the project was withdrawn.

  Many of the supervising scientists had left the compound already. Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug suffered a heart attack and died. The distraught parents of the Supersmarts—who had been forced to stay in the compound all these years, well fed and clothed of course and with access to all modern conveniences except communicative devices—got out and yelled for help.

  Their children were now fifteen to seventeen years old and entirely sleepless. With puberty, they had fully entered into the state some observers described as altered consciousness, others as waking unconsciousness, and others as sleepwalking. The last word was particularly inappropriate. They were anything but asleep. Nor were they oblivious to their surroundings, as is the sleepwalker who wanders out into traffic or tries to scrub the damn’d spot from her hands. They were physically aware at all times. They were never not aware.

  Bodily they were healthy. Because they were fed well and regularly, with food always available, they had no hunting or foraging skills. They walked about, ran aimlessly, sometimes swinging on the playsets furnished them or from tree branches in the park, scratching the dirt into pits and heaps and wrestling with one another. As they matured, these puppy fights had begun to lead to sex play and soon to copulation.

  Two mothers and a father had committed suicide during the long captivity, and a father had died of a stroke. The forty remaining parents had kept up a round-the-clock watch for years, trying to restrain their children: twelve adolescent girls and ten adolescent boys, all awake all the time. The conditions of the experiment prevented the parents from locking any doors; they could not keep the young people from access to one another. The parents’ pleas for locks and contraceptives had been rejected by Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug, who was convinced that the second generation of asomnics would fully vindicate his theory, as expounded in the unpublished manuscript of Asomnia: The Answer Is to Come.

  When the compound was opened, four of the girls had had babies, which were being looked after by the grandparents. Three more of the girls were pregnant. One of the mothers had been raped by one of the asomnic boys and was also pregnant. She was permitted to abort the fetus.

  There followed an obscure and shameful period in which the government disclaimed any responsibility for the experiment and left its subjects to fend for themselves. Some of the Supersmarts were exploited sexually and for pornographic purposes. One was killed by his mother, allegedly in self-defense; she served a brief term in prison. At last, under the rule of the new Forty-Fourth Supreme Pinnacular, all the surviving asomnics, including their infants, were taken to a reservation on a remote island in the vast Ru Mu River delta, where their descendants have remained ever since, wards of the nation of Hy Brisal.

  The second generation failed to vindicate Uy Tug’s theory but proved the skill of the genetic engineers: they bred absolutely true. No descendant of the Supersmarts has been capable of sleep after the age of five.

  There are now about fifty-five asomnics on Wake Island. The climate is very warm, and they go naked. Fruit, cheese, bread, and other foods that need no preparation are left on the shore by an army jetboat every second day. Except for these provisions, tossed ashore from the boat, a strict no-contact policy is maintained. No humanitarian or medical aid is permitted. Tourists, including those from other planes, are allowed on a neighboring islet, where they can catch glimpses of the asomnics from a blind through high-power telescopes. Teams of scientific observers are occasionally lowered from helicopters into two observation towers on the island itself. These towers, inaccessible to the asomnics, are equipped with infrared and other highly sophisticated viewing devices; the observers are hidden behind one-way glass. Pickets from the Save the Asomnic Babies Association are permitted to march and keep vigils on the south shore. From time to time these SABA activists make rescue attempts by boat, but the army jetboats and helicopters have always forestalled them.

  The asomnics bask, walk, run, climb, swing, wrestle, groom themselves and one another, hold and suckle babies, and have sex. Males fight in sexual rivalry and often beat females who reject intercourse. All fight occasionally over food, and there have been a number of apparently causeless killings. Group rape is common, when males are excited by seeing others copulate. There are some indications of affectional bonding between mother and infant and between siblings. Otherwise there are no social relations. No teaching occurs, and there is no sign of individuals learning skills or customs by imitation. Most of the females bear a child a year from the age of thirteen or fourteen on. Their maternal skills can only be innate, and the question of whether human beings have any innate skills has not yet been settled; in any case, most of the babies die. The mothers leave dead babies where they lie. After weaning, children fend for themselves; since an excess of food is always provided, a fair number of them survive to puberty.

  Adult female death is usually from brutality or complications of childbirth. Female asomnics seldom reach thirty years. Males live longer, if they survive the dangerous late teens and early twenties when fighting is all but constant. The longest-lived inhabitant of Wake Island, FB-204, nicknamed Fibby by the observer team, was a female who lived to seventy-one. Fibby bore one infant at age fourteen and was apparently sterile thereafter. She never rejected a male’s effort to copulate and so was seldom beaten. She was shy and very lazy, rarely appearing on the beach except to pick up food and
retreat into the trees with it.

  The current patriarch is a grizzled male, MTT-311, fifty-six years old, muscular and well-made. He spends most days basking on the sand beaches, and at night roams endlessly through the forests of the interior. Sometimes he digs holes and ditches with his hands, or piles up rocks to dam a creek, apparently for the physical pleasure of doing so, as the dams serve no purpose and are never made watertight enough to divert the stream. One of the young females spends a part of almost every night building up piles of torn bark and leaves like huge nests, though she never uses them for anything. Several females hunt for ants or grubs in fallen trees and eat them one by one. These are the only observed evidences of purposive behavior beyond the fulfillment of immediate physical needs.

  Though they are extremely unclean and the females age quickly, most asomnics are handsome in youth. All observers comment on their expression, described as bland, serene, supernally calm. A recent book about the asomnics was entitled “The Happy People”—with the Orichi equivalent of a question mark.

  Orichi thinkers continue to argue about them. Are you happy if you aren’t conscious of being happy? What is consciousness? Is consciousness the great boon we consider it? Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher? Better off in what way and for what? There have been lizards far longer than there have been philosophers. Lizards do not bathe, do not bury their dead, and do not perform scientific experiments. There have been many more lizards than philosophers. Are lizards, then, a more successful species than philosophers? Does God love lizards better than he loves philosophers?

  However one may decide such questions, observation of the asomnics, or of lizards, seems to indicate that consciousness is not necessary to living a contented sentient life. Indeed, when carried to such an extreme as human beings have carried it, consciousness may prevent true contentment: the worm in the apple of happiness. Does consciousness of being interfere with being—pervert, stunt, cripple it? It seems that every mystical practice on every plane seeks precisely to escape from consciousness. If Nirvana is the mind freed of itself, allowed to rejoin the body in the body’s pure oneness with its world or god, have not the asomnics achieved Nirvana?

  Certainly consciousness comes at a high cost. The price of it, evidently, is the third of our lives we spend blind, deaf, dumb, helpless, and mindless—asleep.

  We do, however, dream.

  The poem “Wake Island,” by Nu Lap, portrays the asomnics as spending their whole life “in a dream of dreams . . .”

  Dreams of waters flowing always by the sandbars

  dreams of bodies meeting, opening like deep flowers,

  dreams of eyes forever open to the sun and stars . . .

  A moving poem, it offers one of the very few positive views of the asomnics. But the scientists of Hy Brisal, though they might like to agree with the poet to ease their collective conscience, assert that asomnics do not and cannot dream.

  As on our plane, only certain animals, including birds, dogs, cats, horses, apes, and humans, regularly enter the peculiar and highly specific brain/body condition known as sleep. Once there, and only there, some of them enter the even more peculiar state or activity, characterised by highly specific brainwave types and frequencies, called dreaming.

  The asomnics lack these states of being. Their brains do not do this. They are like reptiles, who chill down into inertia but do not sleep.

  A Hy Brisalian philosopher, To Had, elaborates these paradoxes: To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing. The asomnics know the world continuously and immediately, with no empty time, no room for selfhood. Having no dreams, they tell no stories and so have no use for language. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future. They live here, now, perfectly in touch. They live in pure fact. But they can’t live in truth, because the way to truth, says the philosopher, is through lies and dreams.

  The Nna Mmoy Language

  The “garden utopia” of the Nna Mmoy deservedly enjoys the reputation of being absolutely safe—“an ideal plane for children and elderly people.” The few visitors who come, including children and the aged, usually find it very dull and leave as soon as possible.

  The scenery is all the same everywhere—hills, fields, parklands, woods, villages: a fertile, pretty, seasonless monotony. Cultivated land and wilderness look exactly alike. The few species of plants are all useful, yielding food or wood or fabric. There is no animal life except bacteria, some creatures resembling jellyfish in the oceans, two species of useful insect, and the Nna Mmoy.

  Their manners are pleasant, but nobody has yet succeeded in talking with them.

  Though their monosyllabic language is melodious to the ear, the translatomat has so much trouble with it that it cannot be relied upon even for the simplest conversation.

  A look at the written language may yield some light on the problem. Written Nna Mmoy is a syllabary: each of its several thousand characters represents a syllable. Each syllable is a word, but a word with no fixed, specific meaning, only a range of possible significances determined by the syllables that come before, after, or near it. A word in Nna Mmoy has no denotation, but is a nucleus of potential connotations which may be activated, or created, by its context. Thus it would be possible to make a dictionary of Nna Mmoy only if the number of possible sentences were finite.

  Texts written in Nna Mmoy are not linear, either horizontally or vertically, but radial, budding out in all directions, like tree branches or growing crystals, from a first or central word which, once the text is complete, may well be neither the center nor the beginning of the statement. Literary texts carry this poly-directional complexity to such an extreme that they resemble mazes, roses, artichokes, sunflowers, fractal patterns.

  Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next—its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc., etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use. (Though a phrase, not a sentence, this quotation nicely exemplifies the point: To be or not to—.)

  It appears that in the language of the Nna Mmoy, not only the choice of word—noun or verb, tense, person, etc.—but the meaning of each word is continuously modified by all the words that precede or may follow it in the sentence (if in fact the Nna Mmoy speak in sentences). And so, after receiving only a few syllables, the translatomat begins to generate a flurry of possible alternate meanings which proliferate rapidly into such a thicket of syntactical and connotational possibilities that the machine overloads and shuts down.

  Purported translations of the written texts are either meaningless or ridiculously various. For example, I have come upon four different translations of the same nine-character inscription:

  “All within this space are to be considered friends, as are all creatures under heaven.”

  “If you don’t know what is inside, take care, for if you bring hatred in with you the roof will fall upon you.”

  “On one side of every door is mystery. Caution is useless. Friendship and enmity sink to nothing under the gaze of eternity.”

  “Enter boldly, stranger, and be welcome. Sit down now.”

  This inscription, the characters of which are written so as to form a shape like a comet with a radiant head, is often found on doors, box lids, and book covers.

  The Nna Mmoy are excellent gardeners, vegetarians by necessity. Their arts are cookery, jewelry, and poetry. Each village is able to grow, gather, and make everything it needs. There is some commerce between villages, mostly involving cooked dishes, special preparations of the rather limited vegetable menu by professiona
l cooks. Admired cooks barter their dishes for the raw materials produced by the gardeners, with a bit over. No mining has been observed, but opals, peridots, amethysts, garnets, topazes, and colored quartzes may be picked up in any stream bed; jewels are bartered for unworked or reused gold and silver. Money exists but has only a symbolic, honorary value: it is used in gambling (the Nna Mmoy play various low-keyed gambling games with dice, counters, and tiles) and to buy works of art. The money is the pearly-violet, translucent mantle, about the size and shape of a thumbnail, left by the largest species of jellyfish. Found washed up on the sea beaches, these shells are traded inland for finished jewelry and for poems—if that is what the written texts, single sheets, booklets, and scrolls, so beautiful and teasing to the eye, actually are.

  Some visitors confidently assert that these texts are religious works, calling them mandalas or scriptures. Others confidently assert that the Nna Mmoy have no religion.

  There are many traces on the Nna Mmoy plane of what people from our plane call civilisation, by which people from our plane, these days, usually mean a capitalist economy and an industrial technology based on intense, exhaustive exploitation of natural and human resources.

  Ruins of immense cities, traces of long roads and huge paved areas, vast wastelands of desertification and permanent pollution, and other evidences of progressive society and advanced scientific technology crop up among the fields and border the parklands. All are very ancient and seem to be quite meaningless to the Nna Mmoy, who regard them without awe or interest.