Changing Planes

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  He nodded. He saw nothing to discuss, in all this. He was fishing with gauze gloves, seeing the world through a mesh veil. That was life.

  The storekeeper told me that you could walk to the village in a day and showed me the path. My dispirited landlady packed me a lunch. I set out next morning, attended at first by thin, persistent swarms of flies. It was a dull walk across a low, damp landscape, but the sun was mild and pleasant, and the flies finally gave up. To my surprise, I got to the village before I was even hungry for lunch. The islanders must walk slowly and seldom. It had to be the right village, though, because they spoke only of one, “the village,” again no name.

  It was small and poor and sad: six or seven wooden huts, rather like Russian izbas, stilted up a bit to keep them from the mud. Poultry, something like guinea fowl but mud-brown, scuttled about everywhere, making soft, raucous noises. A couple of children ran away and hid as I approached.

  And there, propped up next to the village well, was the figure Postwand had described, just as he had described it—legless, sexless, the face almost featureless, blind, with skin like badly burned bread, and thick, matted, filthy white hair.

  I stopped, appalled.

  A woman came out of the hut to which the children had run. She came down the rickety steps and walked up to me. She gestured at my translatomat, and I automatically held it out to her so she could speak into it.

  “You came to see the Immortal,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Two radio fifty,” she said.

  I got out the money and handed it to her.

  “Come this way,” she said. She was poorly dressed and not clean, but a fine-looking woman, thirty-five or so, with unusual decisiveness and vigor in her voice and movements.

  She led me straight to the well and stopped in front of the being propped up in a legless canvas fisherman’s chair next to it. I could not look at the face, nor the horribly maimed hand. The other arm ended in a black crust above the elbow. I looked away from that.

  “You are looking at the Immortal of our village,” the woman said in the practiced singsong of the tour guide. “It has been with us for many many centuries. For over one thousand years it has belonged to the Roya family. In this family it is our duty and pride to look after the Immortal. Feeding hours are six in the morning and six in the evening. It lives on milk and barley broth. It has a good appetite and enjoys good health with no sicknesses. It does not have udreba. Its legs were lost when there was an earthquake one thousand years ago. It was also damaged by fire and other accidents before it came into the care of the Roya family. The legend of my family says that the Immortal was once a handsome young man who made his living for many lifetimes of normal people by hunting in the marshes. This was two to three thousand years ago, it is believed. The Immortal cannot hear what you say or see you, but is glad to accept your prayers for its well-being and any offerings for its support, as it is entirely dependent on the Roya family for food and shelter. Thank you very much. I will answer questions.”

  After a while I said, “It can’t die.”

  She shook her head. Her face was impassive; not unfeeling, but closed.

  “You aren’t wearing gauze,” I said, suddenly realising this. “The children weren’t. Aren’t you—”

  She shook her head again. “Too much trouble,” she said, in a quiet, unofficial voice. “The children always tear the gauze. Anyhow, we don’t have many flies. And there’s only one.” It was true that the flies seemed to have stayed behind, in the town and the heavily manured fields near it.

  “You mean there’s only one immortal at a time?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “There are others all around. In the ground. Sometimes people find them. Souvenirs. The really old ones. Ours is young, you know.” She looked at the Immortal with a weary but proprietary eye, the way a mother looks at an unpromising infant.

  “The diamonds?” I said. “The diamonds are immortals?”

  She nodded. “After a really long time,” she said. She looked away, across the marshy plain that surrounded the village, and then back at me. “A man came from the mainland, last year, a scientist. He said we ought to bury our Immortal. So it could turn to diamond, you know. But then he said it takes thousands of years to turn. All that time it would be starving and thirsty in the ground and nobody would look after it. It is wrong to bury a person alive. It is our family duty to look after it. And no tourists would come.”

  It was my turn to nod. The ethics of this situation were beyond me. I accepted her choice.

  “Would you like to feed it?” she asked, apparently liking something about me, for she smiled at me.

  “No,” I said, and I have to admit that I burst into tears. She came closer and patted my shoulder. “It is very, very sad,” she said. She smiled again. “But the children like to feed it,” she said. “And the money helps.”

  “Thank you for being so kind,” I said, wiping my eyes, and I gave her another five radio, which she took gratefully. I turned around and walked back across the marshy plains to the town, where I waited four more days until the sister ship came by from the west, and the nice young man took me out in the boat, and I left the Island of the Immortals, and soon after that I left the Yendian plane.

  We are a carbon-based life-form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering.

  Perhaps “diamond” is only a name the Yendians give these lumps of ruin, a kind of euphemism.

  I am still not certain what the woman in the village meant when she said, “There’s only one.” She was not referring to the immortals. She was explaining why she didn’t protect herself or her children from the flies, why she found the risk not worth the bother. It is possible that she meant that among the swarms of flies in the island marshes there is only one fly, one immortal fly, whose bite infects its victim with eternal life.

  CONFUSIONS OF UÑI

  I’VE HEARS OF PLANES where no one should go, planes no one should visit even briefly. Sometimes in the dreary bustle of airport bars men at the next table talk in low voices, saying things like, “I told him what the Gnegn did to MacDowell,” or, “He thought he could handle it on Vavizzua.” Then a harsh, shrill, enormously amplified voice blats out, “Flight onteen to Hhuhh is now boarding at gate throighty-six,” or, “Shimbleglood Rrggrrggrr to a white courtesy phone please,” drowning out all other voices and driving sleep and hope from the poor souls who droop across blue plastic seats with steel legs bolted to the floor trying to catch a little rest between planes; and the words of the men at the next table are lost. Of course the men may merely be boasting to increase the glamor of their lives; surely if the Gnegn or Vavizzua were truly dangerous, the Interplanary Agency would warn people to stay away—as they warn them to stay off Zuehe.

  It’s well known that the Zuehe plane is unusually tenuous. Visitors of ordinary mass and solidity are in danger of breaking through the delicate meshes of Zuehan reality, damaging a whole neighborhood in the process and ruining the happiness of their hosts. The affectionate, intimate relationships so important to the Zuehe may be permanently strained and even torn apart by the destructive weight of an ignorant and uncaring intruder. Meantime, the intruder suffers no more from such an accident than an abrupt return to his own plane, sometimes in a peculiar position or upside down, which is embarrassing, but after all at an airport one is among strangers and so shame has little power.

  We’d all like to see the moonstone towers of Nezihoa, as pictured in Roman’s Planary Guide, the endless steppes of mist, the dim forests of the Sezu, the beautiful men and women of the Zuehe, with their slightly translucent clothes and bodies, their pale grey eyes, their hair the color of tarnished silver, so fine the hand does not know when it touches it. It is sad that so lovely a plane must not be visited, fortunate that those who have glimpsed it have been able to describe it for us. Still, some people go there. Or
dinarily selfish people justify their invasion of Zuehe by the familiar expedient of considering themselves as not like all those other people who go to Zuehe and spoil it. Extremely selfish people go to Zuehe to boast about it, precisely because it is fragile, destructible, therefore a trophy.

  The Zuehe themselves are far too gentle, reticent, and vague to forbid anybody entry. Verbs in their cloudy language do not even have an indicative mode, let alone an imperative.

  They use only the conditional. They have a thousand ways of saying maybe, perhaps, lest, although, if… but not yes, not no. So at the usual entry point the Interplanary Agency has set up, instead of a hotel, a net, a large, strong, nylon net. In it anybody arriving on Zuehe, even unintentionally, is caught, sprayed with sheep-dip, given a pamphlet containing a straightforward warning in 442 languages, and sent straight back to their own, more durable though less enticing plane, where the Agency makes sure that they arrive upside down.

  I have only been to one plane I really wouldn’t recommend to anybody and to which I shall certainly never return. I’m not sure it is exactly dangerous. I am no judge of danger. Only the brave can be that. Thrills and chills which to some people are the spice of life take the flavor right out of mine. When I’m frightened, food is sawdust—sex, with its vulnerability of body and soul, is the last thing I want—words are meaningless, thought incoherent, love paralysed. Cowardice of this degree is, I know, uncommon. Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder. And they’d find the terror exhilarating and take up skydiving as soon as their broken pelvis mended. Whereas I descend slowly from the stepladder, clutching at the porch rail, and swear I’ll never go above six inches again.

  So I don’t fly any more than I absolutely have to, and when I do get trapped in airports I don’t go looking for the dangerous planes, but for the peaceful ones, the dull, ordinary, complicated ones, where I can be not frightened out of my wits but just ordinarily frightened, the way cowards are most of the time.

  Waiting out a missed connection in the Denver airport, I fell into conversation with a friendly couple who’d been to Uñi. They told me it was “a nice place.” As they were elderly, he laden with an expensive camcorder and other electronic impediments, she wearing pantyhose and deeply unadventurous white wedgie sandals, I thought they wouldn’t have said that about anywhere dangerous. That was stupid of me. I should have been warned by the fact that they weren’t good at description. “Lot going on there,” the man said. “But all pretty much like here. Not one of those foreign places.” The wife added, “It’s a storybook country! Just like things you see on TV.”

  Even that didn’t alert me.

  “The weather’s very nice,” the wife said. The husband amended, “Changeable.”

  That was OK. I had a light raincoat with me. My flight to Memphis wasn’t for an hour and half yet. I went to Uñi.

  I checked into the Interplanary Inn. WELCOME TO OUR FRIENDS FROM THE ASTRAL PLANE! said a sign on the desk. A pale, heavyset, redheaded woman behind the desk gave me a translatomat and a self-guiding map of the town, but also pointed out to me the large placard: EXPERIENCE OUR VIRTUAL REALITY TOUR OF BEAUTIFUL UÑI EVERY TWENTY IZНMIT.

  “You must do,” she said.

  In general I evade “virtual” “experiences,” which were always recorded in better weather than it is today and which take the novelty out of everything you’re about to see without giving any real information. But two pale, heavyset clerks ushered me in such a determinedly friendly fashion to the VR cubicle that I had not the courage to protest. They helped me insert my head into the helmet, wrap the bodywrap around my body, and slip my legs and arms into the long stocking-gloves. And then I sat there quite alone for what felt like at least a quarter of an hour, waiting for the show to start, resisting claustrophobia, watching the colors inside my eyes, and wondering how long an izhmit was. Or was the singular izhm? Or was plural number shown by a prefix, so that the singular would be zhmit? Nothing whatever happened, speculative grammar palled, and I said the hell with it. I slipped out of the VR swaddle, walked past the clerks with guilty nonchalance, and got outside among the potted shrubs. The potted shrubs in front of hotels are the same on every plane.

  I looked at my self-guiding map and set out to visit the Art Museum, which had three stars. The day was cool and sunny. The town, built mostly of grey stone with red tile roofs, looked old, settled, prosperous. People went about their business paying no attention to me. The Uñiats seemed mostly to be heavy-set, white-skinned, and red-haired. All of them wore coats, long skirts, and thick boots.

  I found the Art Museum in its little park and went in. The paintings were mostly of heavyset, white-skinned, red-haired women with no clothes on, though some wore boots. They were well painted, but they didn’t do much for me. I was on my way out when I got drawn into a discussion. Two people, both men I thought, though it was hard to say given the coats, skirts, and boots, stood arguing in front of a painting of a plump red-haired female wearing nothing but boots on a flowered couch.

  As I passed, one of them turned to me and said, or so my translatomat rendered what he said, “If the figure’s a central design element in the counterplay of blocks and masses, you can’t reduce the painting to a study of indirect light on surfaces, can you?”

  He, or she, asked the question so simply, directly, and urgently that I could not merely say, “Excuse me?” or shake my head and pretend to be uncomprehending. I looked again at the painting and after a moment said, “Well, not usefully, perhaps.”

  “But listen to the woodwinds,” said the other man, and I realised that the ambient music was an orchestral piece of some kind, dominated at the moment by plangent wind instruments, oboes perhaps, or bassoons in a high register. “The change of key is definitive,” the man said, a little too loudly. The person sitting behind us leaned forward and hissed, “Shh!” while a person in the row in front of us turned around and glared. Embarrassed, I sat very still throughout the rest of the piece, which was quite pretty, though the changes of key, or something of that kind—the only way I can recognise a change of key is when I cry without knowing why I am crying—gave it a certain incoherence. I was surprised when a tenor, or possibly a contralto, whom I had not previously noticed, stood up and began to sing the main theme in a powerful voice, ending on a long high note to wild applause from the audience in the big auditorium. They shouted and clapped and demanded an encore. But a gust of wind blowing in from the high hills to the west across the village square made all the trees shiver and bow, and looking up at the clouds streaming overhead I realised a storm was imminent. The clouds darkened from moment to moment, another great blast of wind struck, whirling up dust and leaves and litter, and I thought I’d better put on my raincoat. But I had checked it at the cloakroom in the Art Museum. My translatomat was clipped to my jacket lapel, but the self-guiding map had been in my raincoat pocket. I went to the desk in the tiny station building and asked when the next train left, and the one-eyed man behind the narrow iron grating said, “We do not have trains now.”

  I turned to see the empty tracks stretching away under the vast arched roof of the station, track after track, each with its number and its gate. Here and there was a luggage cart, and a single distant passenger straying idly down a long platform, but no trains. “I need my raincoat,” I said, in a kind of panic.

  “Try Lost and Found,” the one-eyed clerk said, and busied himself with forms and schedules. I walked across the great hollow space of the station towards the entrance. Beyond a restaurant and a coffee bar I found the Lost and Found. I went into it and said, “I checked my raincoat at the Art Museum, but I have lost the Art Museum.”

  The statuesque red-haired woman at the counter said, “Wait a minute” in a bored voice, rummaged a bit, and shoved a map across the counter. “Ther
e,” she said, pointing at a square with a white, plump, red-nailed finger. “That’s the Art Museum.”

  “But I don’t know where I am. Where this is. This village.”

  “Here,” she said, pointing out another square on the map. It seemed to be ten or twelve streets from the Art Museum. “Better go while the conformation lasts. Stormy today.”

  “Can I take the map?” I asked pitifully. She nodded.

  I went out into the city streets, so mistrustful that I walked with short steps, as if the pavement might turn into an abyss before my feet, or a cliff face rise up before me, or the street crossing turn into the deck of a ship at sea. Nothing happened. The wide, level streets of the city crossed each other at regular intervals, treeless, quiet. The electric buses and taxis made little noise, and there were no private cars. I walked on. The map took me right back to the Art Museum, which I thought had had green-and-white marble steps instead of black slate ones, but other things about it were as I remembered. In general, I have a poor memory. I went in and asked at the cloakroom for my raincoat. While the black-haired, silver-eyed girl with thin black lips was looking for it, I wondered why I had asked, at the train station, when the next train left. Where had I thought I was going? All I had wanted was my coat at the Art Museum. If there had been a train, would I have taken it? Where would I have got off?

  As soon as I had my coat, I hurried back through the steep, cobbled streets lined with charming balconied houses and crowded with the slender, almost skeletal, black-lipped people of Uñi, towards the Interplanary Hotel to demand an explanation. It was probably something in the air, I thought, as the fog thickened, hiding the mountains above the town and the peaked roofs of the houses on the hills. Maybe people on Uñi smoked something hallucinatory, or there was some pollen or something in the air or in the fog that affected the mind, confused the senses, or—a nasty thought—deleted stretches of memory, so that things seemed to happen without sequence and you couldn’t remember how you’d got where you were or what had happened in between. And having a poor memory, I might not be sure whether I had lost parts of it or not. It was like dreaming in some respects, but I was certainly not dreaming, only confused and increasingly alarmed, so that despite the damp cold I didn’t stop to put on my raincoat, but hurried shivering onward through the forest.