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    Changing Planes: Stories
    Changing Planes: Stories
    Changing Planes: Stories
    Ebook249 pages3 hours

    Changing Planes: Stories

    By Ursula K. Le Guin, Eric Beddow and Karen Joy Fowler

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story • A New York Times Notable Book

    "A fantastical travel guide, reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, in which the narrator visits fifteen planes and describes the people, language and customs with the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist." —USA Today

    In these “vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches” (San Francisco Chronicle), literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin weaves together influences as wide–reaching as Borges, The Little Prince, and Gulliver’s Travels to examine feminism, tyranny, mortality and immortality, art, and the meaning—and mystery—of being human.

    Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she’s found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes.

    Changing planes—not airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existence—enables Sita to visit societies not found on Earth. As “Sita Dulip’s Method” spreads, the narrator and her acquaintances encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage; where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results. With “the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist” (USA Today), Le Guin takes readers on a truly universal tour, showing through the foreign and alien indelible truths about our own human society.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9780544341685
    Changing Planes: Stories
    Author

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with a PEN/Malamud Award and many others. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

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    Reviews for Changing Planes

    4/5

    437 ratings31 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A travelogue of fifteen worlds, haunting or humorous (or both). The bittersweet Seasons of the Ansarac was my favorite, but there is much to savor. If you have commitment issues, this is great way to sample Le Guin. Deceptively heavy.
    • 4/5
      I can't write useful reviews for LeGuin because I love everything she writes.
    • 4/5
      Interesting book. Reminds me of Borges, although it has been many years since I read any of his stuff.
    • 4/5
      The stories are very clever and use alternative locations (planets, dimensions?) to illustrate the various failures of human society throughout its history.
    • 4/5
      A series of vignettes all based on the premise, set out in the first chapter, that inter-planal travel is possible when you're stuck in the liminal time and space of waiting in the airport for a connecting flight. Each subsequent chapter, then, is either a story set in one of the planes or a sort of ethnography of the people/species who live there.
      Does what sci-fi does: uses distant times and places to lightly disguise a close examination of our own culture and times. It's a clever idea cleverly carried out, but the cleverness is somewhat lost on me because I can't ever manage to enjoy short story collections, which is very much how this reads. So take my rating with a large pinch of salt - you may very well enjoy it a lot more than I did.
    • 5/5
      This book has been on my to-read list since it first was published, and why it took me so long to find a copy and read, I don't know. I quite enjoyed the underlying conceit, a play on the words of the title, but I enjoyed more the narrator's descriptions and adventures in a variety of planes. Le Guin manages to pack a lot of entertainment and some deep critiques into the short stories that make up this book.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun book. The premise really was just "How far can I run with a pun on changing airplanes vs astral planes?", but that served as a nice springboard for a series of vignettes of alternate worlds. Some were clearly commentary on this plane, others just seemed like an exploration of a little idea, and the whole book is breezily written - light reading that's worth taking time over.
    • 5/5
      Starting with some cutting observations about airplane travel it moves on to the fantasy of spending time in alternate universe while waiting on airplane connections. The alternate universes are all highly imaginative echoing the ability she displayed on her other work.
    • 4/5
      This is a slender and charming travelogue of places that don't exist. The stories that make it up were published over the last five years in a variety of places, with the exception of the introductory story. "Sita Dulip's Method" sets up a frame for the whole.

      Anyone can visit other planes of existence, but to make the transition you need to achieve a certain level of discomfort, boredom, and indigestion. On our plane of existence, this is only achieved when waiting in an airport between connecting flights--when you are, literally, between planes. The Interplanary Agency maintains a generally loose supervision of this travel, providing translation devices, guidebooks, and accommodations for longer stays. They'll take stronger measures in the event of real misbehavior by visitors or hosts. Without misbehavior, both wonders and quiet horrors are available to the adventurous traveler.

      Enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Is there any greater master of speculative fiction than Ursula K. Le Guin? Here she uses the maddening experience of changing planes (read: sitting in airports post 9-11) as a perfect time to change planes (read: alternate levels of existence). Like an anthropologist in the field, she gives short reports on imagined societies that are so advanced as to be post-language and so primitive as to extend the Christmas shopping season year round and to stage battles with preordained outcomes. There are angel-like creatures with wings and devil-like creatures with hooves. Builders and birds, queens, placid people and immortal souls, and places like libraries and gardens and hotels and grog shops and streets that change direction as you traverse them--all are conjured in Le Guin's clear, unreliable, contradictory, inspirational, satirical voice. Whisper in my ear anytime at all, o great Le Guin!
    • 4/5
      A collection of stories/vignettes connected by an amusing premise: while caught in the unique state of boredom experienced only by the traveller stuck with a layover at an airport, a person can quite literally "change planes" and visit other realms of existence.
      (One gets the feeling that LeGuin doesn't like modern travel much - and indeed, on her website it says that the author is currently taking a sabbatical from any kind of book tours or speaking engagements.)
      Each section describes, from the visitor's perspective, a different 'plane' and the people who live there. The segments are a bit too brief and lacking in full development for me to consider then full 'stories' - but the writing is wonderful, and the book is just full of brilliantly insightful and amusing ideas. LeGuin apparently has many more flashes of creativity on a routine business trip than most authors do in a career. These are the ideas she hasn't fleshed out into full novels, but the book is still a rewarding experience - both funny and with many serious-yet-wry observations about our own world as well as potential alien ways of life.
    • 2/5
      There’s a cunning pun in that title there. It goes like this: a person waiting one day in an airport to catch a connecting flight accidentally discovered a way to visiting other worlds, or, as Le Guin has it in this collection, other planes. Get it? Aeroplanes and alternate universes/planes. And hence this collection of, well, fables, all based on other planes visited by a narrator from Earth. I am not a big fan, I must admit, of fables, though I am certainly a fan of Le Guin’s fiction. So while I can appreciate the art and cleverness with which Changing Planes is put together, I didn’t much enjoy the stories. Meh.
    • 4/5
      Ursula Le Guin is the queen of short stories. I am amazed how she created whole worlds/planes in such a short story. Complete with culture, traditions, language, these planes came to life in this book. It is an interesting concept of being able to travel to other planes as you wait in the airport between planes. Love the play on words. The plane where you have communal dreams was probably my favorite. But also the one where only a few citizens grew wings and could fly and that was a curse. The plane where you could never learn their language because it seemed to disappear as the citizens grew older. The plane that tried to charge for travel. A plane with two warring nations and the one squeezed out starting building a huge building for the other nation. These stories are great.
    • 3/5
      The first story was the best one, a wonderful little thought experiment. The rest of the stories are like little anthropological sketches and have moments of great writing but short stories aren't my favorite form.
    • 4/5
      A fun mixture of satire and worldbuilding. Very Gulliver's Travels, really, except with a likable narrator!
    • 3/5
      Short stories - some more like little snapshots, really - set in different planes or dimensions... some from a traveler from our plane's point of view.
    • 3/5
      LeGuin is a fantastic writer, most notably for her ability to create such a realistic world-setting that readers just fall right into it each time they revisit that place. What she's doing in this collection is exactly that--building world settings that feel so real it's sometimes hard to believe they're science fiction.

      Unfortunately, that's all that's in this book: world settings. There are some pieces with narrative, almost-stories in them; those pieces tend to be the ones originally published in various magazines or other anthologies. Those pieces stand alone, and stand out. The other pieces in this book, though, read like anthropological reports (I know, that's what they're meant to be), but to this reader felt more like the notes that have been kicking around LeGuin's desk--odds and ends she knows she won't have time to explore fully or use in full-length books (or even develop into short stories). Write them up in a creative way, stick 15 of them together, and voila, you have a book you can release to the public.

      Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading these snippets of worlds, some of which I'd love to see further fleshed-out and used. But reading them all together is a challenge: after 4 or 5, I was pretty much done, and ready to see something a little more robust. Three stars is low for this, but four seems high.

      I'm sorry, Ursula. I swear I've loved most of your other books.
    • 3/5
      An enjoyable collection of stories, revolving around the principle that one can change between different worlds (planes) at airports. Several worlds are introduced, written about as if they are travel reports. Some of the stories were quite impressive, others not so interesting, partly because of the 'academic' writing style. Changing planes is a nice in-between book (for travelling by airplane).
    • 4/5
      Several years ago while my husband experienced a frustrating flight for a business trip, I acquired travel reading at a local bookstore. The stories in this collection are all different yet tied together through travel, uncovering history and custom, and commentary. Each story is self-contained enough in that the book can be set aside for years when other covers distract the reader. A few stories required a little more thought to follow than I could handle at bedtime (when I tend to read short stories), but I do not begrudge them. Le Guin has built planes I long to visit.
    • 3/5
      The framing device for these connected short stories from sci-fi/fantasy legend Ursula Leguin is that bored air travelers can slip out of airport lounges into alternative worlds or planes. So, while travelers are waiting to change planes, they can take little side trips by changing planes. The collection is one traveler’s accounts of her visits to alternative planes.

      Reading Changing Places is like getting a series of letters from a traveling friend with newsy reports of her latest stops. But these are not your usual colorful locals and odd customs. The narrator meets people who are mostly human (and part plants and animals), entire populations who migrate north to breed and return south when their young are grown, people compelled to build stone structures that no one uses, people cursed with flight where flyers are considered deformed, and others—each more outlandish than the last.

      The collection showcases LeGuin’s world-building talent. Sixteen stories each present a unique world with one or more species of cool, outrageous, thought provoking, or weird sentient beings. It’s good these various being we meet are interesting because not much actually happens in any of the stories. This gives the collection something of a contemplative mood, like a series of miniature studies in extraterrestrial sociology.

      So, for LeGuin’s fans, this collection offers two things she does best: build worlds and examine their social structures. Few writers come up with so many and so varied new ways to imagine life. And few make it interesting enough you want to keep turning the pages to see what the next plane change will bring.
    • 4/5
      After all those crime books, I thought it was about time for some fantasy! This is a collection of short stories set in parallel planes of existence (yes, the title is some sort of pun). The introduction says that a method for travelling to other worlds was discovered, but it only works if you're in an airport. So when people are stuck waiting for a delayed plane or missed transfer, they can go travelling for a while and not miss much time here.

      Each story is set in another world, and they do somehow have the air of travel writing about them. I enjoyed all of the stories here, but I would have liked to see some trips to more high-technology worlds - the majority of them were set in peaceful, less technologically developed planes, or worlds that have reverted after some kind of event turned them away from that sort of thing. Still, on the whole a very good read.
    • 5/5
      When someone discovers how to 'change planes' while waiting in an airport for a flight, a whole universe of possibilities is opened up. This tells the experiences of some of the planechangers, the planes (or planets) they visit and the societies and cultures they find.

      From the satirical tale of The Holiday Plane, where islands have been converted to cater for different holidays (such as Christmas with the villages of Noel, O Little Town etc), to the amusingly cynical (Hegn, where everyone is royalty apart from a small group of commoners), these stories and accounts are sometimes illuminating, disturbing, sad and peaceful all at the same time.

      It is difficult to pick a favourite chapter out of this (each chapter tells of a different world), I have found the place I would most love to sit and read: The Library Gardens of Mahigul.

      "In spring, during the mild steady rains, big awnings are stretched from one library arcade to the next, so that you can still sit outdoors, hearing the soft drumming on the canvas overhead, looking up from your reading to see the trees and the pale sky beyond the awning."

      and

      "In winter it's often foggy, not a cold fog but a mist through which and in which the sunlight is always warmly palpable, like the colour in a milk opal. The fog softens the sloping lawns and the high, dark trees, bringing them closer, into a quiet, mysterious intimacy."

      I have the feeling I will read these stories again and again and again. The power they provide, the thought they provoke and the rush of emotions they produce are extraordinary. And all done in such a gentle way that you don't realise you're being touched until you take a breath at the end of each one.

      I would highly recommend this. I never expected it to be as good as it is, and I am surprised I had never heard of it before.

      4.5 out of 5
    • 4/5
      "Confusions of Uni" was my favorite story in this collection about visits to other planes. They are accessed from the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floors of airport terminals, and a two-day trip takes only minutes in our time.
    • 4/5
      This is a light read, but a good one. I highly recommend it for while traveling. Le Guin's writing here is consistent with what would be expected, but the darker themes she usually employs aren't as prominent in this novel. Indeed, the novel itself is hard to classify as such since it reads much more like a collection of short stories strung together by a narrator whose story doesn't seem to really be the point of the novel.

      The point of the novel, in fact, seems to be rather thinly veiled commentary on modern society. Society in general is fun to comment on, and she gets fairly wild with some of the alternate worlds she introduces to us in this book. The tone remains throughout one of an anthropological, somewhat distant discussion and study of these fictional cultures. For those who enjoy this style of exploring cultures, this will be a delight. For those who find this style displeasing, I recommending picking up a book by a different author entirely.

      As a whole, this is both an entertaining read, and a fun examination of how cultures work.
    • 4/5
      I love this book - its a collection of short stories written almost as an allegory or fable feel to them, each story is about a different plane, and that you can only get to these plains by waiting at airport terminals.
    • 4/5
      8 odd short and light tales. Le Guin I feel doesn't like flying, particularly not the hassle involved with airports and making connections, and in this ever pressured environment who can blame her. These are tales of differen planes - places that can be reached when the desperation and indegestion of the airport gets sufficently burdensome that anywhere else is better. Anywhere being the key point.

      Populated with odd types living their lives as they have always done, and interacting with the travelling tourist through the Interplanetary Travel Agency. Vaguely dark, cycnical tales, but not particularly thought provoking. Despite finishing the book only yesterday I can only really remember that bird people featured in a couple, and that there was a fantastic library planet which had had a dark history.

      Easy reading, enjoyable, weird but ultimately nothing special. Good for travelling!
    • 5/5
      This is my first book by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I'm very pleased at this introduction. I'd found this in a bargain stack, so it's double the luck! Changing Planes is a collection of interconnected stories about interplanary travel. It is quite a fascinating concept, and sounds wonderful to experience! The planes and people in these pieces may be very different or similar to ours, but each has something to say about humans and our society. A witty and clever observation!
    • 4/5
      A neat and amusing collection of fantasy short stories. Quite light, but enjoyable nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      Interesting look at other worlds.
    • 4/5
      A great collection of short stories describing the narrator's visits to alternate realities (planes) while stuck in airports waiting to change...um...planes. A triumph of the freedom of the mind even though the body may be bound to our own humble plane. These are individual stories, but they are bound together by this common theme, and it could be viewed as a fantasy travel book, a collection of sociological studies, or a biting satire on parts of our own culture.

    Book preview

    Changing Planes - Ursula K. Le Guin

    [Image]

    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

    Copyright © 2003 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

    The Silence of the Asonu first appeared in Orion as The Wisdom of the Asonu. Copyright © 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Seasons of the Ansarac first appeared on www.infinitematrix.net. Copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Royals of Hegn first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Copyright © 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Building first appeared in Redshift. Copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Fliers of Gy first appeared on www.scifi.com. Copyright © 2000 by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Island of the Immortals first appeared in Amazing Stories. Copyright © 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

    Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Eric Beddows.

    All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

    www.hmhco.com

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929–

    Changing planes / Ursula K. Le Guin ; illustrations by Eric Beddows.—Ace trade pbk. ed.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 0-441-01156-X

    1. Fantasy fiction, American. 2. Imaginary societies. 3. Voyages, Imaginary. I. Title.

    PS3562.E42C48 2004

    813'.54—dc22

    2004046109

    eISBN 978-0-544-34168-5

    v1.0314

    Author’s Note

    This book was written when the miseries of air travel seemed to be entirely the doing of the corporations that ran the airports and the airlines, without any help from bigots with beards in caves. Spoofing the whole thing was easy. They were mere discomforts, after all. Things have changed, but the principle on which Sita Dulip’s Method is founded remains valid. Error, fear, and suffering are the mothers of invention. The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

    Sita Dulip's Method

    The range of the airplane—a few thousand miles, the other Sita Dulip’s Method side of the world, coconut palms, glaciers, the poles, the Poles, a lama, a llama, etc.—is pitifully limited compared to the vast extent and variety of experience provided, to those who know how to use it, by the airport.

    Airplanes are cramped, jammed, hectic, noisy, germy, alarming, and boring, and they serve unusually nasty food at utterly unreasonable intervals. Airports, though larger, share the crowding, vile air, noise, and relentless tension, while their food is often even nastier, consisting entirely of fried lumps of something; and the places one has to eat it in are suicidally depressing. On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility. In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats. So far, then, the airport and the airplane are equal, in the way that the bottom of one septic tank is equal, all in all, to the bottom of the next septic tank.

    If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there’s five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you’ve missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?

    In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can’t go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

    [Image]

    It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who first realised this, and so discovered the interplanar technique most of us now use.

    Her connecting flight from Chicago to Denver had been delayed by some unspeakable, or at any rate untold, malfunction of the airplane. It was listed as departing at 1:10, two hours late. At 1:55, it was listed as departing at 3:00. It was then taken off the departures list. There was no one at the gate to answer questions. The lines at the desks were eight miles long, only slightly shorter than the lines at the toilets. Sita Dulip had eaten a nasty lunch standing up at a dirty plastic counter, since the few tables were all occupied by wretched, whimpering children with savagely punitive parents, or by huge, hairy youths wearing shorts, tank tops, and rubber thongs. She had long ago read the editorials in the local newspaper, which advocated using the education budget to build more prisons and applauded the recent tax break for citizens whose income surpassed that of Rumania. The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. She had been sitting for over an hour on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor in a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor facing a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor, when (as she later said), It came to me.

    She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere—be anywhere—because she was already between planes.

    She found herself in Strupsirts, that easily accessible and picturesque though somewhat three-dimensional region of waterspouts and volcanoes, still a favorite with beginning interplanary travelers. In her inexperience she was nervous about missing her flight and stayed only an hour or two before returning to the airport. She saw at once that, on this plane, her absence had taken practically no time at all.

    Delighted, she slipped off again and found herself in Djeyo. She spent two nights at a small hotel run by the Interplanary Agency, with a balcony overlooking the amber Sea of Somue. She went for long walks on the beach, swam in the chill, buoyant, golden water—like swimming in brandy and soda, she said—and got acquainted with some pleasant visitors from other planes. The small and inoffensive natives of Djeyo, who take no interest in anyone else and never come down to the ground, squatted high in the crowns of the alm-palms, bargaining, gossiping, and singing soft, quick love songs to one another. When she reluctantly returned to the airport to check up, nine or ten minutes had passed. Her flight was soon called.

    She flew to Denver to her younger sister’s wedding. On the flight home she missed her connection at Chicago and spent a week on Choom, where she has often returned since. Her job with an advertising agency involves a good deal of air travel, and by now she speaks Choomwot like a native.

    Sita taught several friends, of whom I am happy to be one, how to change planes. And so the technique, the method, has gradually spread out from Cincinnati. Others on our plane may well have discovered it for themselves, since it appears that a good many people now practice it, not always intentionally. One meets them here and there.

    While staying with the Asonu I met a man from the Candensian plane, which is very much like ours, only more of it consists of Toronto. He told me that in order to change planes all a Candensian has to do is eat two dill pickles, tighten his belt, sit upright in a hard chair with his back not touching the back, and breathe ten times a minute for about ten minutes. This is enviably easy, compared to our technique. We (I mean people from the plane I occupy when not traveling) seem unable to change planes except at airports.

    The Interplanary Agency long ago established that a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom is the essential facilitator of interplanary travel; but most people, from most planes, don’t have to suffer the way we do.

    The following reports and descriptions of other planes, given me by friends or written from notes I made on my own excursions and in libraries of various kinds, may induce the reader to try interplanary travel; or if not, they may at least help to pass an hour in an airport.

    Porridge on Islac

    It must be admitted that the method invented by Sita Dulip is not entirely reliable. You sometimes find yourself on a plane that isn’t the one you meant to go to. If whenever you travel you carry with you a copy of Roman’s Handy Planary Guide, you can read up on wherever it is you get to when you get there, though Roman is not always reliable either. But the Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it’s dead?

    I arrived on Islac unintentionally, when I was inexperienced, before I had learned to tuck Roman into my suitcase. The Interplanary Hotel there did have a set of the Encyclopedia, but it was at the bindery, because, they said, the bears had eaten the glue in the bindings and the books had all come to pieces. I thought they must have rather odd bears on Islac, but did not like to ask about them. I looked around the halls and my room carefully in case any bears were lurking. It was a beautiful hotel and the hosts were pleasant, so I decided to take my luck as it came and spend a day or two on Islac. I got to looking over the books in the bookcase in my room and trying out the built-in legemat, and had quite forgotten about bears, when something scuttled behind a bookend.

    I moved the bookend and glimpsed the scuttler. It was dark and furry but had a long, thin tail of some kind, almost like wire. It was six or eight inches long not counting the tail. I didn’t much like sharing my room with it, but I hate complaining to strangers—you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well—so I moved the heavy bookend over the hole in the wall the creature had disappeared into, and went down to dinner.

    The hotel served family style, all the guests at one long table. They were a friendly lot from several different planes. We were able to converse in pairs using our translatomats, though general conversation overloaded the circuits. My left-hand neighbor, a rosy lady from a plane she called Ahyes, said she and her husband came to Islac quite often. I asked her if she knew anything about the bears here.

    Yes, she said, smiling and nodding. They’re quite harmless. But what little pests they are! Spoiling books, and licking envelopes, and snuggling in the bed!

    Snuggling in the bed?

    Yes, yes. They were pets, you see.

    Her husband leaned forward to talk to me around her. He was a rosy gentleman. Teddy bears, he said in English, smiling. Yes.

    Teddy bears?

    Yes, yes, he said, and then had to resort to his own language—teddy bears are little animal pets for children, isn’t that right?

    But they’re not live animals.

    He looked dismayed. Dead animals?

    No—stuffed animals—toys—

    Yes, yes. Toys, pets, he said, smiling and nodding.

    He wanted to talk about his visit to my plane; he had been to San Francisco and liked it very much, and we talked about earthquakes instead of teddy bears. He had found a 5.6 earthquake a very charming experience, very enjoyable, and he and his wife and I laughed a great deal as he told about it. They were certainly a nice couple, with a positive outlook.

    When I went back to my room I shoved my suitcase up against the bookend that blocked the hole in the wall, and lay in bed hoping that the teddy bears did not have a back door.

    Nothing snuggled into the bed with me that night. I woke very early, being jet-lagged by flying from London to Chicago, where my westbound flight had been delayed, allowing me this vacation. It was a lovely warm morning, the sun just rising. I got up and went out to take the air and see the city of Slas on the Islac plane.

    It might have been a big city on my plane, nothing exotic to my eye, except the buildings were more mixed in style and in size than ours. That is, we put the big imposing buildings at the center and on the nice streets, and the small humble ones in the neighborhoods or barrios or slums or shantytowns. In this residential quarter of Slas, big houses were all jumbled up together with tiny cottages, some of them hardly bigger than hutches. When I went the other direction, downtown, I found the same wild variation of scale in the office buildings. A massive old four-story granite block towered over a ten-story building ten feet wide, with floors only five or six feet apart—a doll’s skyscraper. By then, however, enough Islai were out and about that the buildings didn’t puzzle me as much as the people did.

    They were amazingly various in size, in color, in shape. A woman who must have been eight feet tall swept past me, literally: she was a street sweeper, busily and gracefully clearing the sidewalk of dust. She had what I took to be a spare broom or duster, a great spray of feathers, tucked into her waistband in back like an ostrich’s tail. Next came a businessman striding along, hooked up to the computer network via a plug in his ear, a mouthpiece, and the left frame of his spectacles, talking away as he studied the market report. He came up about to my waist. Four young men passed on the other side of the street; there was nothing odd about them except that they all looked exactly alike. Then came a child trotting to school with his little backpack. He trotted on all fours, neatly, his hands in leather mitts or boots that protected them from the pavement; he was pale, with small eyes, and a snout, but he was adorable.

    A sidewalk café had just opened up beside a park downtown. Though ignorant of what the Islai ate for breakfast, I was ravenous, ready to dare anything edible. I held out my translatomat to the waitress, a worn-looking woman of forty or so with nothing unusual about her, to my eye, but the beauty of her thick, yellow, fancifully braided hair. Please tell me what a foreigner eats for breakfast, I said.

    She laughed, then smiled a beautiful, kind smile, and said, via the translatomat, "Well, you have to tell me that. We eat cledif, or fruit with cledif."

    Fruit with cledif, please, I said, and presently she brought me a plate of delicious-looking fruits and a large bowl of pale yellow gruel, smooth, about as thick as very heavy cream, lukewarm. It sounds ghastly, but it was delicious—mild but subtle, lightly filling and slightly stimulating, like café au lait. She waited to see if I liked it. I’m sorry, I didn’t think to ask if you were a carnivore, she said. Carnivores have raw cullis for breakfast, or cledif with offal.

    This is fine, I said.

    Nobody else was in the place, and she had taken a liking to me, as I had to her. May I ask where you come from? she asked, and so we got to talking. Her name was Ai Li A Le. I soon realised she was not only an intelligent person but a highly educated one. She had a degree in plant pathology—but was lucky, she said, to have a job as a waitress. Since the Ban, she said, shrugging. When she saw that I didn’t know what the Ban was, she was about to tell me; but several customers were sitting down now, a great bull of a man at one table, two mousy girls at another, and she had to go wait on them.

    I wish we could go on talking, I said, and she said, with her kind smile, Well, if you come back at sixteen, I can sit and talk with you.

    I will, I said, and I did. After wandering around the park and the city I went back to the hotel for lunch and a nap, then took the monorail back downtown. I never saw such a variety of people as were in that car—all shapes, sizes, colors, degrees of hairiness, furriness, featheriness (the street sweeper’s tail had indeed been a tail) and, I thought, looking at one long, greenish youth, even leafiness. Surely those were fronds over his ears? He was whispering to himself as the warm wind swept through the car from the open windows.

    [Image]

    The only thing the Islai seemed to have in common, unfortunately, was poverty. The city certainly had been prosperous once, not very long ago. The monorail was a snazzy bit of engineering, but it was showing wear and tear. The surviving old buildings—which were on a scale I found familiar—were grand but run-down, and crowded by the more recent giant’s houses and doll’s houses and buildings like stables or mews or rabbit hutches—a terrible hodgepodge, all of it cheaply built, rickety-looking,

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