Changing Planes

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  Isla Cinco de Mayo (a fully developed plan that is evidently about to be implemented)

  Sit Seder Every Night! (lack of detailed information on this indicates that the project has been shelved)

  Kwanzaa! Afric-Island (a rough sketch of facilities and “participatory entertainments,” with approving notations from higher-ups, such as Go for if)

  Tét Everlasting (almost no details)

  Holi Holi Holi (a long, enthusiastic memo, describing all the possibilities of colored water and colored powder and classical Indian dance, signed R. Chandranathan, which does not seem to have received encouragement from above)

  Sita continues to investigate the Great Joy Corporation and its plane.

  HAVING WRITTEN THIS MUCH, I decided to put the piece away until I had heard from Sita again. It was nearly a year before she got in touch and brought me up to date.

  Soon after we talked, Sita decided to notify the Interplanary Agency of the operations of the Great Joy Corporation on “The Holiday Plane™”—which turned out to have been known for centuries to the Agency. It is described (in its original state) and listed in the Encyclopedia Planaria as Musu Sum.

  The Agency, as may be imagined, is overloaded with the tasks of registering and investigating newly discovered planes, installing and inspecting transfer points, hostels, and tourist facilities, regulating interplanar relations, and a thousand such responsibilities. But when they learned that a plane had been closed to free entry and exit and was being operated as a sort of prison camp for its inhabitants to the profit of the operators, they acted at once, decisively.

  I do not know how the Agency exerts its authority, or even on what its authority rests, or what instruments of persuasion it may use; but the Great Joy Corporation no longer exists. It has ceased to be, as mysteriously as it came to be, still without a history, or a face, or a shred of accountability.

  Sita sent me the new literature from Musu Sum. The island resorts are now being operated by the islanders themselves as a cooperative venture, supervised for the first year by expert advisers from the Agency.

  This makes sense, in that the modest subsistence economy of the region was completely destroyed by the Great Joy Corporation and cannot be restored overnight, while all the hotels and restaurants and roller coasters are in place, and people who have been trained to serve and entertain the tourists might as well use and profit by their training. On the other hand, it boggles the mind a bit. Especially Fourth Island. An orgiastic monument of American sentimental nationalism operated entirely by people who know nothing about the United States except that they were ruthlessly used by Americans for years? Well, I suppose it is not wholly improbable even on this plane. Exploitation can cut two ways.

  I have met a native of Musu Sum, one of the first to take advantage of his people’s newly regained freedom to travel; Sita asked him to come by and see me. He thanked me most graciously for my part in the liberation of his people. That it was a totally accidental and tangential part made no difference to Esmo So Mu. He gave me as a “gift of the gratitude of my people” a little wickerwork ball, a child’s toy, rather crudely made. “We don’t make such beautiful things like Americans,” he said apologetically, but I think he saw that I was touched by the gift.

  His English was quite fluent. He had been one of Santa’s elves as a boy and then was transferred to New Year’s Island as a waiter and part-time gigolo. “It was not so bad,” he said, then, “It was bad,” and then, his high-cheek-boned, expressive face crinkling into a laugh, “but not very-very bad. Only the food was very-very bad.”

  Esmo So Mu described his world: hundreds of islands, many with a population of only a family or two, scattered out over the ocean “forever.” People traveled from island to island in catamarans. “Everybody go visit all the time,” he said.

  The Great Joy Corporation had concentrated population in one archipelago and forbidden sailing in or out of that area. “Burn boats,” Esmo So Mu said briefly.

  He had been born on an island south of the Holiday Islands and was now living there again. “Lots more money if I stay to work at the hotel,” he said, “but I don’t care.” I asked him to tell me about his home. “Oh,” he said, and laughed again. “You know what? In my home there’s no holidays! Because we are so lazy! We work one, two hours, in the gardens, then we don’t work. We play, we play with the children. We go sail. We fish. We swim. We sleep. We cook. We eat. We sleep. Why do we want a holiday?”

  But Cousin Sulie was disappointed to find that the management has changed. “I don’t expect I’ll go back this August,” she told me rather sadly, when I called to wish her a happy birthday. “It just doesn’t seem like it would be like Christmas if it was a different nationality. Do you think?”

  WAKE ISLAND

  PEOPLE WHO SLEEP ONLY two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don’t hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring.

  On the plane of the Orichi, which is in many ways very similar to ours, there are people who don’t sleep at all.

  A group of scientists in the Orichi nation of Hy Brisal became convinced that sleep was a vestigial behavior pattern appropriate to lower mammals but not to sapient humans. Sleep might serve to keep vulnerable simians quiet and out of harm’s way at night, but is as irrelevant to civilised life as hibernation would be. Worse, it is an impediment to intelligence—a recurrent damper on the brain. By interrupting the brain’s ongoing functions every night, by grossly interfering with coherent thought, sleep prevents the human mind from attaining its maximum potential. Sleep makes us stupid, was the motto of the Orichi scientists.

  Their government, fearing invasion from the rival nation of Nuum, encouraged any experimentation that might give Hy Brisal the edge in weaponry or brainpower. So, well funded, working with brilliant genetic engineers, and provided with ten patriotic pairs of fertile volunteers, all housed in a closed-gate compound, these scientists began a program, nicknamed Su-persmarts by the national news net, which eagerly supported it. And in four years the first entirely sleepless babies were born. (Millions of bleary-eyed young parents might dispute that statement; but the usual baby does go to sleep, after all, just about the time its parents have to get up.)

  The first Supersmart babies, however, died. Some died in their first weeks, some after several months. They cried day and night until they wasted away into silence and death.

  The scientists decided that infant sleep is an extension of the fetal development process that cannot safely be bypassed.

  Hy Brisal and Nuum were in a particularly confrontational phase. Rumor had it that Nuum was working on an airborne germ that would sterilise all Hy Brisalian males. Popular support for the Supersmarts program had been shaken by the loss of the infants, but the government did not waver; they sent the genetic engineers back to the drawing board and asked for a new set of volunteers. Twenty-two patriotic couples signed up on the first day. In less than two years they began to produce the new generation of Supersmarts.

  The programming was delicate and accurate. The new-borns would sleep as much as ordinary infants to begin with, but would gradually begin to stay awake for longer and longer periods, until by the age of four they were expected to do without sleep altogether.

  And so they did. They did not waste away; they thrived. They were fine, healthy babies, all twenty-two of them. They stared up at their mothers and smiled. They kicked and cooed and sucked and crawled and did what babies do, including sleep. They were bright, because much attention was paid to them and their learning environment was rich, but they were not geniuses, yet. They learned what babies learn, including googoo and gaga, and then mama and papa, and NO, and the rest of the toddler vocabulary, at only slightly better than the average rate. Radical acceleration of learning and increase in active
intelligence would come as they began staying awake.

  By the time they were two, most of them were sleeping less than six hours a night. There was some natural variation in what the directors of the program called their asomnic development. The prizewinner was Baby Ha Dab, who gave up naps at ten months, and at twenty-six months was sleeping only two or three hours a night.

  For several months Ha Dab, a pretty little fellow with big eyes and silvery, curly hair, was the darling of the Hy Brisalian media. He was on everybody’s homescreen—”Smartsyboy.” Here was Ha Dab lurching cheerily across a room to greet the Scientist General, Doctor Master Professor Uy Tug, author of Asomnia: The Answer, who stooped with a pinched though genuine smile to shake his tiny hand. Here was Ha Dab rolling in the grass with the blapdog puppy presented to him by the Supreme Pinnacular of Hy Brisal. Here was Ha Dab cuddling down in his little bed as if to sleep, thumb in mouth, but popping up again bright-eyed to mug at the cam man. Then Smartsyboy faded from the net, as all fads fade. For over a year little was heard about the Supersmarts program.

  The Hy Brisalian Highly Intellectual Net Locus then ran a noninteractive informational video which—carefully—raised some questions concerning the validity of asomnist theory and the supersmartness of the Supersmarts test children. The most telling part of the presentation was a brief scene of Ha Dab, now three and a half and fully asomnic, playing with his blap-dog. They were both charming little creatures, having a wonderful time roughhousing in the compound park, but it was rather troubling to see that the naked child followed the dog around instead of the dog following the child. Ha Dab also seemed curiously indifferent to the presence of strangers. When asked questions, he sometimes ignored the speaker and sometimes responded at random, as if neither speech nor human relationship meant much to him. Asked “Are you in school now?,” he wandered off a few steps and squatted down right before the cameras to defecate. There seemed to be nothing defiant about his action. It was purely shameless.

  Another child shown in the presentation, however, Ra Gna, a delicate girl of nearly four who had been designated as “slow to develop” because she was still sleeping four hours a night, responded with adorable verve to the reporters, telling them that she liked school because there were micoscopes wif wiggly fings inside of them, and that she could read her affabet book nearly. Ra Gna, however, did not become the next media darling. The Supersmarts program refused to allow any more cam men on the premises for over two years—until public curiosity and media pressure became too strong for them to withstand.

  At this point Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug announced that the Asomnia Test was successful. None of the twenty-two children, now just under four to just over six, was sleeping more than half an hour a night, and all were in excellent health. As for their intellectual development, he explained that since it was of course not proceeding as that of hypersomnic children did, it could not be measured by the same standards. There was, however, no possible doubt of their very high intelligence.

  This did not quite satisfy the homescreen audience, or the maverick scientists who had questioned the theory of asomnism, or even the government which was supporting Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug’s program in hopes of a generation of geniuses who would bring Nuum to its knees and confirm Hy Brisal as the supermost superpower in the world. After a good deal of time and pressure and committee meetings, a Committee of Scientific Investigation charged with making a disinterested report was forced upon the fiercely resistant Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug and his staff.

  The investigators found many of the parents of the Supersmarts pathetically eager to talk to them, begging for advice, help, treatment for their children. One after another, these loving and desperate mothers and fathers said the same words: “They’re sleepwalking.”

  One young mother, uneducated but observant, set her little boy down in front of a mirror and told the investigator to watch him. “Mi Min,” she said to the child, “look, Mi Min, who’s that in the mirror? Who’s that, honey? That little boy, what’s he doing?” But the child “did not relate in any way to the image,” as the investigator wrote. “He showed no interest in it. He never looked into the eyes of the mirror image. Later I noticed that though his glance sometimes crossed mine at random, he did not look into my eyes, nor could I look into his. I found this curiously disquieting.”

  The same investigator was also disturbed by the fact that none of the children pointed at anything or followed the direction of a pointing finger. “Animals and young infants,” he wrote, “look at the finger rather than at the direction pointed at, and do not point themselves. Pointing as a meaningful and understood gesture is a normal spontaneous development occurring in an infant’s first year.”

  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 Super-smarts 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.