CONFUSIONS OF UNI 83

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 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.

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 inter-planary 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 Inter-planary 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 aim-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 Can-densian 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 cafe 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 trans-latomat 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, luke warm. It sounds ghastly, but it was delicious—mild but subtle, lightly filling and slightly stimulating, like cafe 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 leanness. Surely those were fronds over his ears? He was whispering to himself as the warm wind swept through the car from the open windows.

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, shabby. The Islai themselves were shabby, when they weren't downright ragged. Some of the furrier and featherier ones were clothed only by their fur and feathers. The green boy wore a modesty apron, but his rough trunk and limbs were bare. This was a country in deep, hard economic trouble.

Ai Li A Le was sitting at one of the outside tables at the cafe (the cledifac) next door to the one where she waited tables. She smiled and beckoned to me, and I sat down with her. She had a small bowl of chilled cledif with sweet spices, and I ordered the same. "Please tell me about the Ban," I asked her.

"We used to look like you," she said.

"What happened?"

"Well," she said, and hesitated. "We like science. We like engineering. We are good engineers. But perhaps we are not very good scientists." To summarise her story: the Islai had been strong on practical physics, agriculture, architecture, urban development, engineering, invention, but weak in the life sciences, history, and theory. They had their Edisons and Fords but no Darwin, no Mendel. When their airports got to be just like ours, if not worse, they began to travel between planes; and on some plane, about a hundred years ago, one of their scientists discovered applied genetics. He brought it home. It fascinated them. They promptly mastered its principles. Or perhaps they had not quite mastered them before they started applying them to every life-form within reach.

"First," she said, "to plants. Altering food plants to be more fruitful, or to resist bacteria and viruses, or to kill insects, and so on." I nodded. "We're doing a good deal of that too," I said.

"Really? Are you..." She seemed not to know how to ask the question she wanted to ask. "I'm corn, myself," she said at last, shyly. I checked the translatomat. Uslu: corn, maize. I checked the dictionary, and it said that uslu on Islac and maize on my plane were the same plant. I knew that the odd thing about corn is that it has no wild form, only a distant wild ancestor that you'd never recognise as corn. It's entirely a construct of long-term breeding by ancient gatherers and farmers. An early genetic miracle. But what did it have to do with Ai Li A Le?

Ai Li A Le with her wonderful, thick, gold-colored, corn-colored hair cascading in braids from a topknot...

"Only four percent of my genome," she said. "There's about half a percent of parrot, too, but it's recessive. Thank God." I was still trying to absorb what she had told me. I think she felt her question had been answered by my astonished silence.

"They were utterly irresponsible," she said severely. "With all their programs and policies and making everything better, they were fools. They let all kinds of things get loose and interbreed. Wiped out rice in one decade. The improved breeds went sterile. The famines were terrible... Butterflies, we used to have butterflies, do you have them?"

"Some, still," I said.

"And deletu?" A kind of singing firefly, now extinct, said my translatomat. I shook my head wistfully.

She shook her head wistfully.

"I never saw a butterfly or a deletu. Only pictures... The insecticidal clones got them... But the scientists learned nothing—nothing! They set about improving the animals. Improving us! Dogs that could talk, cats that could play chess! Human beings who were going to be all geniuses and never get sick and live five hundred years! They did all that, oh yes, they did all that. There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. I can't stand talking dogs. My big poodle Rover, he never says a word, the dear good soul. And then the humans! We'll never, ever get rid of the Premier. He's a Healthy, a bloody GAPA. He's ninety now and looks thirty and he'll go on looking thirty and being premier for four more centuries. He's a pious hypocrite and a greedy, petty, stupid, mean-minded crook. Just the kind of man who ought to be siring children for five centuries ... The Ban doesn't apply to him... But still, I'm not saying the Ban was wrong. They had to do something. Things were really awful, fifty years ago. When they realised that genetic hackers had infiltrated all the laboratories, and half the techs were Bioist fanatics, and the Godsone Church had all those secret factories in the eastern hemisphere deliberately turning out genetic melds... Of course most of those products weren't viable. But a lot of them were... The hackers were so good at it. The chicken people, you've seen them?"

As soon as she asked, I realised that I had: short, squat people who ran around in intersections squawking, so that all the traffic gridlocked in an effort not to run them over. "They just make me want to cry," Ai Li A Le said, looking as if she wanted to cry.

"So the Ban forbade further experimentation?" I asked. She nodded. "Yes. Actually, they blew up the laboratories. And sent the Bioists for reeducation in the Gubi. And jailed all the Godsone Fathers. And most of the Mothers too, I guess. And shot the geneticists. And destroyed all the experiments in progress. And the products, if they were"—she shrugged— " 'too far from the norm.' The norm!" She scowled, though her sunny face was not made for scowling. "We don't have a norm any more. We don't have species any more. We're a genetic porridge. When we plant maize, it comes up weevil-repellent clover that smells like chlorine. When we plant an oak, it comes up poison oak fifty feet high with a ten-foot-thick trunk. And when we make love we don't know if we're going to have a baby, or a foal, or a cygnet, or a sapling. My daughter—" and she paused. Her face worked and she had to compress her lips before she could go on. "My daughter lives in the North Sea. On raw fish. She's very beautiful. Dark and silky and beautiful. But—I had to take her to the seacoast when she was two years old. I had to put her in that cold water, those big waves. I had to let her swim away, let her go be what she is. But she is human too! She is, she is human too!"

She was crying, and so was I.

After a while, Ai Li A Le went on to tell me how the Genome Collapse had led to profound economic depression, , ^ only worsened by the Purity Clauses of the Ban, which restricted jobs in the professions and government to those who tested 99.44% human—with exceptions for Healthies, Righteous Ones, and other GAPAs (Genetically Altered Products Approved by the Emergency Government). This was why she was working as a waitress. She was four percent maize.

"Maize was once the holy plant of many people, where I come from," I said, hardly knowing what I said. "It is such a beautiful plant. I love everything made out of corn—polenta, hoecake, cornbread, tortillas, canned corn, creamed corn, hominy, grits, corn whiskey, corn chowder, on the cob, tamales—it's all good. All good, all kind, all sacred. I hope you don't mind if I talk about eating it!"

"Heavens no," said Ai Li A Le, smiling. "What did you think cledif was made from?"

After a while I asked her about teddy bears. That phrase of course meant nothing to her, but when I described the creature in my bookcase she nodded—"Oh yes! Bookbears. Early on, when the genetic designers were making everything better, you know, they dwarfed bears way down for children's pets. Like toys, stuffed animals, only they were alive. Programmed to be passive and affectionate. But some of the genes they used for dwarfing came from insects—springtails and earwigs. And the bears began to eat the children's books. At night, while they were supposed to be cuddling in bed with the children, they'd go eat their books. They like paper and glue. And when they bred, the offspring had long tails, like wires, and a sort of insect jaw, so they weren't much good for the children any more. But by then they'd escaped into the woodwork, between the walls... Some people call them bearwigs." I have been back to Mac several times to see Ai Li A Le. It is not a happy plane, or a reassuring one, but I would go to worse places than Islac to see so kind a smile, such a topknot of gold, and to drink maize with the woman who is maize.

THE SILENCE OF THE ASONU

THE SILENCE OF THE ASONU is proverbial. The first visitors to their plane believed that these gracious, gracile people were mute, lacking any language other than that of gesture, expression, and gaze. Later, hearing Asonu children chatter, the visitors suspected that among themselves the adults spoke, keeping silence only with strangers. We know now that the Asonu are not dumb, but that once past early childhood they speak very rarely to anyone, under any circumstances. They do not write; and unlike mutes, or monks under vows of silence, they do not use any signs or other devices in place of speaking.

This nearly absolute abstinence from language makes them fascinating. People who live with animals value the charm of muteness. It can be a real pleasure to know when the cat walks into the room that he won't mention any of your shortcomings, or that you can tell your grievances to your dog without his repeating them to the people who caused them. Those who can't talk, and those who can talk but don't, have the great advantage over the rest of us in that they never say anything stupid. This may be why we are convinced that if they spoke they would have something wise to say.

Thus there has come to be considerable tourist traffic to the Asonu. Having a strong tradition of hospitality, the Asonu entertain their visitors with generosity and courtesy, though without modifying their own customs.

Some tourists go there simply in order to join the natives in their silence, grateful to spend a few weeks where they do not have to festoon and obscure every human meeting with verbiage. Many such visitors, having been accepted into a household as a paying guest, return year after year, forming bonds of unspoken affection with their quiet hosts. Others follow their Asonu guides or hosts about, talking to them hour after hour, confiding their whole life to them, in rapture at having at last found a listener who won't interrupt or comment or mention that his cousin had an even larger tumor than that. As such people usually know little Asonu and speak entirely in their own language, they evidently aren't worried by the question that vexes some visitors: Since the Asonu don't talk, do they, in fact, listen?

They certainly hear and understand what is said to them in their own language, since they're prompt to respond to their children, to indicate directions by gesture to the halting and mispronounced inquiries of tourists, and to leave a building at the cry of "Fire!" But the question remains, do they listen to discursive speech and sociable conversation, or do they merely hear it while keeping silently attentive to something beyond speech? Their amiable and apparently easy manner seems to some observers the placid surface of a deep preoccupation, a constant alertness, like that of a mother who while entertaining her guests or seeing to her husband's comfort is listening every moment for the cry of her baby in another room.

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

Some visitors to their world are convinced that the lips of these quiet people are locked upon a knowledge which, in proportion as it is hidden, must be valuable—a spiritual treasure, a speech beyond speech, possibly even that ultimate revelation promised by so many religions, and indeed frequently delivered, but never in a wholly communicable form. The transcendent knowledge of the mystic cannot be expressed in language. It may be that the Asonu avoid language for this very reason. It may be that they keep silence because if they spoke, everything of importance would have been said.

Believers in the Wisdom of the Asonu have followed individuals about for years, waiting for the rare words they speak, writing them down, saving them, studying them, arranging and collating them, finding arcane meanings and numerical correspondences in them, in search of the hidden message. To some, however, these utterances do not seem to be as momentous as one might expect from their rarity. They might even be described as banal.

There is no written form of the Asonu language, and translation of speech is considered to be so uncertain that translatomats aren't issued to the tourists, most of whom don't want them anyway. Those who wish to learn Asonu can do so only by listening to and imitating children, who by six or seven years old are already becoming unhappy when asked to talk. Here are the Eleven Sayings of the Elder of Isu, collected over four years by a devotee from Ohio, who had already spent six years learning the language from the children of the Isu Group. Months of silence occurred between most of these statements, and two years between the fifth and sixth.

1. Not there.

2. It is almost ready [or] Be ready for it soon.

3. Unexpected!

4. It will never cease.

5. Yes.

6. When?

7. It is very good.

8. Perhaps.

9. Soon.

10. Hot! [or] Very warm!

11. It will notecase.

The devotee wove these eleven sayings into a coherent spiritual statement or testament which he understood the Elder to have been making, little by little, during the last four years of his life. The Ohio Reading of the Sayings of the Elder of Isu is as follows: (1) What we seek is not in any object or experience of our mortal life. We live among appearances, on the verge of the Spiritual Truth. (2) We must be as ready for it as it is ready for us, for (3) it will come when we least expect it. Our perception of the Truth is sudden as a lightning flash, but (4) the Truth itself is eternal and unchanging. (5) Indeed we must positively and hopefully, in a spirit of affirmation, (6) continually ask when, when shall we find what we seek? (7) For the Truth is the medicine for our soul, the knowledge of absolute goodness. (8, 9) It may come very soon. Perhaps it is coming even now in this moment. (10) Its warmth and brightness are as those of the sun, but the sun will perish (11) and the Truth will not perish. Never will the warmth, the brightness, the goodness of the Truth cease or fail us.

Another interpretation of the Sayings may be made by referring to the circumstances in which the Elder spoke, faithfully recorded by the devotee from Ohio, whose patience was equaled only by the Elder's: 1. Spoken in an undertone as the Elder looked through a chest of clothing and ornaments.

2. Spoken to a group of children on the morning of a ceremony. 3. Said with a laugh in greeting the Elder's younger sister, returned from a long trip.

4. Spoken the day after the burial of the Elder's sister. 5. Said while embracing the Elder's brother-in-law some days after the funeral.

6. Asked of an Asonu "doctor" who was making a "spirit-body" drawing in white and black sand for the Elder. These drawings seem to be both curative and diagnostic, but we know very little about them. The observer states that the doctor's answer was a short curving line drawn outward from the navel of the spirit-body figure. This, however, may be only the observer's reading of what was not an answer at all.

7. Said to a child who had woven a reed mat.

8. Spoken in answer to a young grandchild who asked, "Will you be at the big feast, Grandmother?"

9. Spoken in answer to the same child, who asked, "Are you going to be dead like Great-Auntie?"

10. Said to a baby who was toddling towards a firepit where the flames were invisible in the sunlight.

11. Last words, spoken the day before the Elder's death. The last six Sayings were all spoken in the last half year of the Elder's life, as if the approach of death had made the Elder positively loquacious. Five of the Sayings were spoken to, or in at least in the presence of, young children who were still at the talking stage.

Speech from an adult must be very impressive to an Asonu child. Like the foreign linguists, Asonu babies learn the language by listening to older children. The mother and other adults encourage the child to speak only by attentive listening and prompt, affectionate, wordless response. The Asonu live in close-knit, extended-family groups, in frequent contact with other groups. Their pasturing life, following the great flocks of anamanu which furnish them wool, leather, milk, and meat, leads them on a ceaseless seasonal nomadic circuit within a vast shared territory of mountains and foothills. Families frequently leave their groups to go wandering and visiting. At the great festivals and ceremonies of healing and renewal many groups come together for days or weeks, exchanging hospitality. No hostile relations between groups are apparent, and in fact no observer has reported seeing adult Asonu fight or quarrel. Arguments clearly are out of the question.

Children from two to six years old chatter to each other constantly; they argue, wrangle, bicker, quarrel, and sometimes come to blows. As they reach six or seven they begin to speak less and quarrel less. By the time they are eight or nine most of them are very shy of words and reluctant to answer a question except by gesture. They have learned to quietly evade inquiring tourists and linguists with notebooks and recording devices. By adolescence they are as silent and as peaceable as the adults. Children between eight and twelve do most of the looking after the younger ones. All the sub-adolescent children of the family group go about together, and in such groups the two-to-six-year-olds provide language models for the babies. Older children shout wordlessly in the excitement of a game of tag or hide-and-seek, and sometimes scold an errant toddler with a "Stop!" or "No!"-just as the Elder of Isu murmured "Hot!" when a child approached an invisible fire; though of course the Elder may have been using that circumstance as a parable, in order to make a statement of profound spiritual meaning, as appears in the Ohio Reading. Even songs lose their words as the singers grow older. A game rhyme sung by little children has words: ",

Look at us tumbledown Stumbledown tumbledown All of us tumbledown All in a heap!

The five-and six-year-olds pass the words of the song along to the little ones. Older children cheerfully play the games, falling into wriggling child-heaps with yells of joy, but they do not sing the words, only the tune, vocalised on a neutral syllable.

Adult Asonu often hum or sing at work, while herding, while rocking the baby. Some of the tunes are traditional, others improvised. Many employ motifs based on the whistles of the anamanu. None of the songs have words; all are hummed or vocalised. At the meetings of the clans and at marriages and funerals the ceremonial choral music is rich in melody and harmonically complex and subtle. No instruments are used, only the voice. The singers practice many days for the ceremonies. Some students of the music of the Asonu believe that their particular spiritual wisdom or insight finds its expression in these great wordless chorales. I am inclined to agree with others who, having lived a long time among the Asonu, believe that their group singing is an element of a sacred occasion, and certainly an art, a festive communal act, and a pleasurable release of feeling, but no more. What is sacred to them remains in silence. The little children call people by relationship words, mother, uncle, clan sister, friend, etc. If the Asonu have names, we do not know them. About ten years ago a zealous believer in the Secret Wisdom of the Asonu kidnapped a child of four from one of the mountain clans in the dead of winter. He had obtained a zoo collector's permit, and smuggled her back to our plane in an animal cage marked ANAMANU. Believing that the Asonu enforce silence on their children, his plan was to encourage the little girl to keep talking as she grew up. When adult, he thought, she would thus be able to speak the innate Wisdom which her people would have obliged her to keep secret.

For the first year or so she would talk to her kidnapper, who, aside from the abominable cruelty of his action, seems to have begun by treating her kindly enough. His knowledge of the Asonu language was limited, and she saw no one else but a small group of sectarians who came to gaze worshipfully at her and listen to her talk. Her vocabulary and syntax gained no enlargement, and began to atrophy. She became increasingly silent.

Frustrated, the zealot decided to teach her English so that she would be able to express her innate Wisdom in a different tongue. We have only his report, which is that she "refused to learn," was silent or spoke almost inaudibly when he tried to make her repeat words, and "did not obey." He ceased to let other people see her. When some members of the sect finally notified the civil authorities, the child was about seven. She had spent three years hidden in a basement room. For a year or more she had been whipped and beaten regularly "to teach her to talk," her captor explained,

"because she's stubborn." She was dumb, cowering, undernourished, and brutalised.

She was promptly returned to her family, who for three years had mourned her, believing she had wandered off and been lost on a glacier. They received her with tears of joy and grief. Her condition since then is not known, because the Inter-planary Agency closed the entire area to all visitors, tourist or scientist, at the time she was brought back. No foreigner has been up in the Asonu mountains since. We may well imagine that her people were resentful; but nothing was ever said. 

FEELING AT HOME WITH THE ENNEBET

I EXPECT PEOPLE WHO don't look like me not to be like me, a reasonable expectation, as expectations go; but it makes my mind slow to admit that people who look like me may not be like me. The Hennebet look remarkably like me. That is to say, not only are they the same general shape and size as people on my plane, with ringers and toes and ears and all the other bits we check a baby for, but also they have pallid skin, dark hair, nearsighted eyes of mixed brown and green, and rather short, stocky figures. Their posture is terrible. The young ones are bright and agile, the old ones are thoughtful and forgetful. An unadventurous and timid people, fond of landscape and inclined to run away from strangers, they are monogamous, hardworking, slightly dyspeptic, and deeply domestic.

When I first came to their plane I felt at home at once, and—perhaps since I looked like one of them and even, in some respects, acted like one of them—the Hennebet did not show any inclination to run away from me. I stayed a week at the hostel. (The Interplanary Agency, which has existed for several kalpas, maintains hostels, inns, and luxury hotels in many popular regions, while protecting vulnerable areas from intrusion.) Then I moved to the home of a widow who supported her family by offering room and board to a few people, all of them natives but me. The widow, her two teenage children, the three other boarders, and I all ate breakfast and dinner together, and so I found myself a member of a native household. They were certainly kindly people, and Mrs. Nan-nattula was an excellent cook.

The Hennebet language is notoriously difficult, but I struggled along with it with the help of the translatomat provided by the Agency. I soon felt that I was beginning to know my hosts. They were not really distrustful; their shyness was mostly a defense of their privacy. When they saw I wasn't invasive, they unstiffened; and I unstiffened by making myself useful. Once I convinced Mrs. Nannattula that I really wanted to help her in the kitchen, she was happy to have a chef's apprentice. Mr. Battannele needed a listener, and I listened to him talk about politics (Hennebet is a socialist democracy run mainly by committees, not very efficiently, perhaps, but at least not disastrously). And I traded informal language lessons with Tenngo and Annup, nice adolescents. Tenngo wanted to be a biologist and her brother had a gift for languages. My translatomat was useful, but I learned most of what Hennebet I learned by teaching Annup English.

With Tenngo and Annup I seldom felt the disorientation that would come over me every now and then in conversation with the adults, a sense that I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, that there had been an abrupt, immense discontinuity in comprehension. At first I blamed it on my poor grasp of the language, but it was more than that. There were gaps. Suddenly the Hennebet were on the other side of the gap, totally out of reach. This happened particularly often when I talked with my fellow boarder, old Mrs. Tattava. We'd start out fine, chatting about the weather or the news or her embroidery stitches, and then all at once the discontinuity would occur right in the midst of a sentence. "I find leafstitch nice for filling odd-shaped areas, but it was such a job painting the whole building with little leaves, I thought we'd never finish it!"

"What building was that?" I said.

"Hali tutuve," she said, placidly threading her needle. I had not heard the word tutuve before. My translatomat gave it as shrine, sacred enclosure, but had nothing for hali. I went to the library and looked it up in the Encyclopedia of Hennebet. Hali, it said, had been a practice of the people of the Ebbo Peninsula in the previous millennium; also there was a folk dance called halihali.

Mrs. Tattava was standing halfway up the stairs with a rapt expression. I said good day. "Imagine the number of them!" she said.

"Of what?" I asked cautiously.

"The feet," she said, smiling. "One after the other, one after the other. Such a dance! So long a dance!"

After several of these excursions I asked Mrs. Nannattula in a circuitous fashion if Mrs. Tattava was having a problem with her memory. Mrs. Nannattula, chopping greens for the tunum poa, laughed and said, "Oh, she's not all there. Not at all!"

I said some conventionality—"What a pity."

My hostess glanced at me with faint puzzlement but pursued her thought, still smiling. "She says we're married! I love to talk with her. It's a real honor to have so much abba in the house, don't you think? I feel very lucky!"

I knew abba: it was a common shrub, an evergreen; we used abba berries, pungent, a bit like juniper, in certain dishes. There was an abba bush in the back yard and a little jar of the dried berries in the cupboard. But I didn't think the house was full of them.

I brooded over Mrs. Tattava's "hali shrine." I knew of no shrines at all on Hennebet, except the little niche in the living room where Mrs. Nannattula always kept a few flowers or reeds or, come to think of it, a sprig of abba. I asked her if the niche had a name, and she said it was the tutuve.

Gathering courage, I asked Mrs. Tattava, "Where is the hali tutuve?" She did not answer for a while. "Quite far away these days," she said at last, with a faraway look. Her gaze brightened a little as it returned to me.

"Were you there?"

"No."

"It's so hard to be sure," she said. "Do you know I never say I wasn't anywhere any more, because so often it turns out that I am—or are, as I should say, shouldn't we? It was very beautiful. Oh, that was so far away!

And all along it's right here now!" She looked at me with such cheer and pleasure that I could not help smiling and feeling happy, though I had not the faintest idea what she was talking about.

Indeed I had at last begun to notice that the people of "my" household, and the Hennebet in general, were very much less like me than I had assumed. It was a matter of temperament, of temper. They were temperate. They were well-tempered. They were good-tempered. It was not a virtue, an ethical triumph; they simply were good-natured people. Very different from me.

Mr. Battannele talked politics with gusto and energy, with a lively interest in the problems, but it seemed to me that there was something missing, some element I was used to considering part of political talk. He didn't shift about as some weak-minded folk do, adapting his views to his interlocutor's, but he never seemed to defend any particular view of his own. Everything was left open. He would have been the most dismal failure on a radio call-in talk show or a TV experts round table. He lacked moral outrage. He seemed to have no convictions. Did he even have opinions?

I often went with him to the corner grogshop and listened to him discussing issues of policy with his friends, several of whom served on governing committees. All of them listened, considered, spoke, often with animation and excitement, interrupting one another to make their points; they got quite passionate; but they never got angry. Nobody ever contradicted anybody, even in such subtle ways as meeting an assertion with silence. Yet they didn't seem to be trying to avoid dissension, or to conform their ideas to a norm, or to work towards a consensus. And most puzzling of all, these political discussions would suddenly dissolve into laughter—chuckles, belly laughs, sometimes the whole group ending up gasping and wiping their eyes—as if discussing how to run the country was the same thing as sitting around telling funny stories. I never could get the joke.

Listening on the networks, I never once heard a committee member state that anything must be done. And yet the Hen-nebet government did get things done. The country seemed to run quite smoothly, taxes were collected, garbage was collected, potholes were repaved, nobody went hungry. Elections were held at frequent intervals; local votes on this and that issue were always being announced on the networks, with informative material supplied. Mrs. Nannattula and Mr. Battannele always voted. The children often voted. When I realised that some people had more votes than others, I was shocked.

Annup told me that Mrs. Tattava had eighteen votes, although she usually didn't bother to cast any, and probably could have thirty or forty, if she'd bother to register.

"But why does she have more votes than other people?"

"Well, she's old, you know," the boy said. He was touch-ingly modest when he gave me information or corrected my misunderstandings. They all were. They acted as if they were reminding me of something I knew that had slipped my mind. He tried to explain: "Like, you know, I only have one vote."

"So as you get older... you're supposed to be wiser?" He looked uncertain.

"Or they honor the elderly by giving them more votes... ?"

"Well, you already have them, you know," Annup said.

"They come back to you, you know? Or you come back to them, actually, Mother says. If you can keep them in mind. The other votes you had." I must have looked blank as a brick wall. "When you, you know, were living again." He did not say living before, he said living again.

"People remember other—their other—lives," I said, and looked for confirmation.

Annup thought it over. "I guess so," he said, uncertain. "Is that how you do it?"

"No," I said. "I mean, I never did. I don't understand." I brought up the English word transmigration on my translatomat. The Hennebet translation was about birds who fly north in the rainy season and south in the dry season. I brought up reincarnation, and it told me about digestive processes. I brought up my big gun: metempsychosis. The machine told me that there was no word for this "belief" held by many peoples of the other planes that "souls" moved at death into different

"bodies." The translatomat was working in Hennebet, of course, but the words I have put in quotation marks were all in English. Annup came by while I was engaged in this research. The Hennebet use no large machinery, doing all their digging and building with hand tools, but they long ago borrowed electronic technologies from people on other planes, using them for information storage and communication and voting and so on. Annup adored the translatomat, which was to him a toy, a game. He laughed now. "'Belief'—that's thinking so?" he asked. I nodded.

"What's 'souls'?" he asked.

A moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun, so I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I'm unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here," she repeated, with a comfortable little laugh, and went on with her embroidery. I have talked to other people about the Hennebet. Some of them are convinced that the Hennebet do literally experience reincarnation, remembering more and more of their previous lives as they grow older, until at death they rejoin an innumerable multitude of former selves, and are then reborn bringing this immaterial trail or train of old lives into a new life.

But I can't square this with the fact that soul and body are a single thing to them, so that either nothing or everything is material or immaterial. Nor does it fit with what Mrs. Tattava said about "all the other persons living this life." She did not say "other lives." She did not say

"living this life at other times." She said, "They're here too." I have no idea what abba is, aside from the plant with pungent little berries.

All I can really say about the Hennebet is that a few months with them confused my expectations of identity and my ideas about time very much, and that since my visit to them I seem unable to maintain a really strong opinion about anything; but that is neither here nor there. 

THE IRE OF THE VEKSI

NOT MANY PEOPLE VISIT the Veksian plane. They are afraid its inhabitants will hurt them. In fact, the Veksi resolutely ignore visitors from other planes, considering them to be the impotent and evil-smelling ghosts of dead enemies who will go away if no attention at all is paid to them. This has generally proved to be true.

Some students of the varieties of behavior have, however, stayed and learned a good deal about their unwilling and indifferent hosts. The following description was given to me by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous.

The Veksi are an angry species. Their social life consists largely of arguments, recriminations, quarrels, fights, outbursts of fury, fits of the sulks, brawls, feuds, and impulsive acts of vengeance. There is no difference in size or strength between the men and the women of the Veksi. Both sexes supplement their natural strength with weapons, carried at all times. Their mating is often so violent that it causes injury and occasionally death to one or both of the participants. They go about mostly on all fours, though they can and do walk upright with vigorous grace on their short, strong hind limbs, which end in hoofs. The Veksi forelimb is so jointed that the limb can be used equally well as a leg or arm. The slender forehoof encloses and protects a hand, kept curled in a fist inside the hoof when it is walked upon. When extended from the hoof, the four opposable digits are as dextrous and graceful as the human hand.

The hair of the Veksi grows coarse and long on the head and back, and as a fine, thick down or fur everywhere else on the body except the palms and genitals. The skin color is tan or brown, the hair color black, brown, tan, rusty, or a mixture of these in various brindles and shadings. As the Veksi age, white hairs appear, and old Veksi may be pure white; but there are not many old Veksi.

Clothing, being unnecessary for protection from cold or heat, is a matter of belts, harnesses, and ribbons, worn as adornment and to furnish pockets and holsters for tools and weapons.

The irritability of the Veksi temperament makes it hard for them to live together, but their need for social stimulation and conflict makes it impossible for them to live apart. The common solution is a fenced village of five or six large domed clay houses and fifteen or twenty small ones, built partly underground. These houses are called omedra. The large, many-roomed omedra contain households, usually a group of related women and dieir children or sexually partnered women and their children. Men—relatives, sexual partners, and friends—can join a household only on invitation, may leave at will, and must leave if ordered out by the women. If they don't leave, all the women and most of the other men attack them savagely, drive them away bleeding, and throw stones at them if they try to return.

The small, one-room omedra are occupied by single adults, called solitaries. Solitaries are men who have been driven out of the big omedra and men and women who choose to live alone. Solitaries may frequent one or more households; they work in the fields with the others, but they sleep and eat most meals alone. An early visitor described a Veksi village as "five big houses full of women swearing at each other and fourteen little houses full of men sulking."

This pattern is maintained in the cities, which are essentially villages banded together against other groups of villages, built on river islands or defensible mesas or surrounded by moats and earthworks. The cities are divided into distinct neighborhoods socially similar to the rural villages. Rancor, rivalry, and hatred prevail amongst all neighbors in villages, cities, and city neighborhoods. Feuds and forays are continuous. Most men and women die of wounds. Though war on a large scale, involving more than a few villages or two cities, seems to be unknown, peaceful coexistence of villages or neighborhoods rests on temporary and contemptuous avoidance, and is always of brief duration. The Veksi have no value for power or control over others, and do not fight to gain dominion. They fight in anger and for revenge. This may explain why, though Veksi intelligence and technological skill could easily have achieved weapons that kill at a distance, they fight with knife, dagger, and club, or barehanded—barehoofed. In fact their fighting is restricted by a great many unspoken traditions or customs of great authority. For example, no matter what the provocation, they never destroy crops or orchards in their raids and vendettas. I visited a rural village, Akagrak, all of whose adult men had been killed in fights and feuds with three nearby villages. None of the rich river-bottom land of Akagrak had been harmed or taken by the victors in these battles.

I witnessed the funeral of the last man of the village, a White—that is, an old man—who had gone out alone to avenge his murdered nephew and had been stoned to death by a troop of youths from one of the other villages, Tkat. Killing by throwing stones is a transgression of the code of battle. The people of Akagrak were furious, their outrage not softened by the fact that the people of Tkat had punished their own young transgressors so severely that one died and another was lamed for life. In Akagrak the surviving males, six boys, were not allowed to go into battle till they turned fifteen, the age when all Veksi men and some women become Warriors. Along with the girls under fifteen, the boys were working very hard in the fields, trying to replace the dead men. All the Warriors of Akagrak were now women who had no children or whose children were grown. These women spent most of their time ambushing people from Tkat and the other villages.

Women who are bringing up children are not Warriors; they fight only defensively, except when a child has been murdered.

Then the mother leads the other women in a vengeance raid. The Veksi do not normally invade one another's villages and do not intentionally attack or kill children. But children of course get killed in the furious battles. A child's death is called murder and justifies invasion. The non-Warrior women, the avenging mothers, walk openly into the murderers' village. They don't kill any children, but they will kill any man or woman who fights back. Their moral advantage is such that they are seldom met with resistance. The guilty villagers simply sit in the dirt and await punishment. The avengers kick, beat, revile, and spit on them. Usually they demand a blood gift, a child to replace the murdered one. They don't kidnap or force a child to come with them. A child has to agree or volunteer to go with them. Curiously enough, this is what usually happens.

Children under fifteen also quite often run away to a neighboring, which is to say an enemy, village. There they can count on being accepted into a household. The runaways may stay till their spite against their own people is out, or even permanently. I asked such a child, a girl of about nine, in Akagrak, why she had left her village. She said, "I was mad at Ma."

In the cities, children are frequent accidental victims of the almost constant street fighting. Their death may be avenged, but their avengers are not immune, as they are in the villages, for in the cities the social code has decayed or broken down altogether. The three large cities of the Veksi are so dangerous that people over thirty are a rare sight in their streets. Yet they are constantly repopulated by runaways from the villages. The children of the Veksi are handled pretty roughly from infancy on. There is no doubt that Veksi parents passionately love their own and feel a strong responsibility towards all children—as witness the fact that runaways are always taken in and treated just as well (or badly) as the children of the village. Babies get constant care and attention from the parents and relatives, a fierce, impatient care, never tender. Slaps, shakes, curses, shouts, and threats are the stuff of every child's life. Adults do try to govern their fierce tempers with children under fifteen. A violent child beater will be beaten by other adults, and a solitary who hurts children will be, literally, kicked out of the village.

The children treat all adults warily. Holding their own among their peers is less of a problem. Much of their quarrelsome behavior seems to be imitative. Veksi babies are silent, watchful, and stoical. When not with adults, Veksi children j work and play together quite peaceably. This behavior changes j as they approach the Warrior age of fifteen, when, whether driven by physiological changes or by cultural expectations, they begin to pick fights, retaliate fiercely to any slight, and indulge in prolonged sulks that flare into fits of berserk rage.

Visiting a large omedra full of wrathful people, one gets the impression that adult Veksi do nothing but shout, scold, swear, and quarrel, but the real rule of their life is avoidance. Most adults even in a household, certainly the solitaries, spend most of the time belligerently maintaining distance and independence. This is one reason they find it so easy to ignore us "ghosts"—they ignore one another most of the time. It's unwise for a Veksi ever to come closer than arm's length to another Veksi without a clear invitation. It's dangerous for anybody, sister or stranger, to approach a solitary's house. If they have to do so, they stand at a distance and shout various ritual statements of warning and appeasement. Even so the solitary may ignore them, or come out with a scowl and a short sword to run them off. Women solitaries are notoriously even more short-tempered and dangerous than the men.

Despite their irritability with one another, the Veksi can and do work together. Most of their highly effective agriculture is communal, pursued according to efficient and unvarying custom. Fierce arguments and quarrels arise unceasingly over details of the customs, but the work goes on.

The tubers and grains they raise are rich in protein and carbohydrates; they eat no meat except for several kinds of grub, the larvae of insects encouraged to live on their crops, which they use for flavoring and condiments. They brew a strong beer from one of their seed crops. Except for parents restraining or directing their children (often in the face of sullen or screaming resistance), no person claims authority over another. There are no chiefs in the villages, no bosses in the fields or the city factories. There is no social hierarchy.

They do not accumulate wealth, avoiding economic dominance as they avoid social dominance. Anyone who gains possessions much exceeding those of the rest of the community promptly gives everything away or spends it on community needs, such as building repairs, tools, or weapons. Men often give weapons to people they hate, either as a shaming device or as a kind of dare. Women, being in charge of the households, the young, and the infirm, have the right to hoard food against bad times; but if a household has a bumper crop, they share it out as fast as possible, giving grain away, and putting on lavish feasts for the whole village. Much beer is drunk at these feasts. I expected that drinking would lead the Veksi straight to carnage, and was quite alarmed the first time I found myself observing a village feast; but beer seems to mellow the Veksi rage, and instead of quarreling with each other they're likely to spend the night getting sentimental over old deaths and quarrels, weeping together and showing each other their scars.

The Veksi are rigid monotheists. Their god is conceived as the force of destruction, against which no creature can long stand. To them, existence is a rebellion against law. Human life is a brief defiance of inevitable doom. The stars themselves are mere sparks in the fire of annihilation. Names of God in various Veksi rituals and chants are: Ender, Vast Devastator, Ineluctable Hoof, Waiting Void, Rock That Smashes Brain. Images of the deity are black stones, some natural, some carved and polished into globes or disks. Private or community worship consists mainly of lighting a fire before one of these stones and chanting or shouting ritual words and verses. Wooden drums are kicked furiously with the rear hoofs, making a terrible noise. There is no priesthood, but adults make sure the children learn the ceremonies.

I was present at the funeral of the White man of Akagrak. His body was laid out on a plank, unclothed; the sacred stone of his omedra was laid on his chest, and a black pebble was placed in each of his hands, curled within his forehoofs. Four of his closest relatives carried the body to the burning ground, walking upright. All the people of the village followed on all fours. A big pyre of logs and brushwood was ready, and the corpse was set atop it. Nearby a smaller fire of knots had been smoldering for an hour or so. People picked up burning knots and embers with their bare hands and hurled them into the pyre, shouting and screaming in what appeared to be pure, uncontrolled rage. The dead man's granddaughter yelled over and over, "How could you do this to me? How could you go and die? You didn't really love me! I'll never forgive you!" Other relatives and descendants ranted at the dead man for not caring that they loved him, for abandoning them, running away when they needed him, living so long and then dying after all. Many of these accusations and upbraidings were clearly ritual and traditional, but they were delivered with unmistakable anger. People wept, tore off their belts and ornaments and hurled them cursing into the fire, tore at the hair of their head and arms, rubbed dirt and soot on their faces and bodies. Whenever the fire began to burn low they ran for more fuel and piled it on furiously. Children who cried were impatiently given a handful of dried fruit and told, "Shut up! Eat your teeth! Grandfather is not listening! Grandfather has deserted you! You are worthless orphans now!"

As evening came on, the pyre at last was allowed to burn down. The body had been entirely consumed. There was no burial of what bone fragments may have been left in the ashes and embers, but the sacred black stone was retrieved and restored to its shrine. The people, exhausted, dragged themselves back to the village, locked the gates for the night, and went to bed fasting and unwashed, with burned hands and sore hearts. There was no doubt in my mind that all the villagers had been proud of the old man, for it is a real achievement for a Veksi to live to be a White, and that some of them had loved him dearly; but their laments were accusations, their grief was rage.

SEASONS OF THE ANSARAC

To the Ospreys of McKenzie Bridge, whose lifestyle inspired this story I TALKED FOR A LONG TIME once with an old Ansar. I met him at his Interplanary Hostel, which is on a large island far out in the Great Western Ocean, well away from the migratory routes of the Ansarac. It is the only place visitors from other planes are allowed, these days. Kergemmeg lives there as a native host and guide, to give visitors a little whiff of local color, for otherwise the place is like a tropical island on any of a hundred planes—sunny, breezy, lazy, beautiful, with feathery trees and golden sands and great, blue-green, white-maned waves breaking on the reef out past the lagoon. Most visitors come to sail, fish, beachcomb, and drink fermented u, and have no interest otherwise in the plane or in the sole native of it they have met. They look at him, at first, and take photos, of course, for he is a striking figure: about seven feet tall, thin, strong, angular, a little stooped by age, with a narrow head, large, round, black-and-gold eyes, and a beak. There is an all-or-nothing quality about a beak that keeps the beaked face from being as expressive as those on which the nose and mouth are separated, but Kergemmeg's eyes and eyebrows reveal his feelings very clearly. Old he may be. but he is a passionate man.

He was a little bored and lonely among the uninterested tourists, and when he found me a willing listener (surely not the first or last, but currently the only one), he took pleasure in telling me about his people, as we sat with a tall glass of iced ii in the long, soft evenings, in a purple darkness all aglow with the light of the stars, the shining of the sea waves full of luminous creatures, and the pulsing glimmer of clouds of fireflies up in the fronds of the feather trees.

From time immemorial, he said, the Ansarac have followed a Way. Madan, he called it. The way of my people, the way things are done, the way things are, the way to go, the way that is hidden in the word always: like ours, his word held all those meanings. "Then we strayed from our Way," he said. "For a little while. Now again we do as we have always done."

People are always telling you that "we have always done thus," and then you find that their "always" means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have always done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice...

The Ansarac had a somewhat different choice to make than we did, perhaps a more limited one. But it has its interest.

Their world has a larger sun than ours and is farther from it, so, though its spin and tilt are much the same as Earth's, its year lasts about twenty-four of ours. And the seasons are correspondingly large and leisurely, each of them six of our years long.

On every plane and in every climate that has a spring, spring is the breeding time, when new life is born; and for creatures whose life is only a few seasons or a few years, early spring is mating time, too, when new life begins. So it is for the Ansarac, whose life span is, in their terms, three years.

They inhabit two continents, one on the equator and a little north of it, one that stretches up towards the north pole; the two are joined by a long, mountainous bridge of land, as the Americas are, though it is all on a smaller scale. The rest of the world is ocean, with a few archipelagoes and scattered large islands, none with any human population except the one used by the Interplanary Agency.

The year begins, Kergemmeg said, when in the cities of the plains and deserts of the south, the Year Priests give the word and great crowds gather to see the sun pause at the peak of a certain tower or stab through a certain target with an arrow of light at dawn: the moment of solstice. Now increasing heat will parch the southern grasslands and prairies of wild grain, and in the long dry season the rivers will run low and the wells of the city will go dry. Spring follows the sun northward, melting snow from those far hills, brightening valleys with green... And the Ansarac will follow the sun.

"Well, I'm off," old friend says to old friend in the city street. "See you around!" And the young people, the almost-one-year-olds—to us they'd be people of twenty-one or twenty-two—drift away from their households and groups of pals, their colleges and sports clubs, and seek out, among the labyrinthine apartment complexes and communal dwellings and hostelries of the city, one or the other of the parents from whom they parted, back in the summer. Sauntering casually in, they remark, "Hullo, Dad," or "Hullo, Mother. Seems like everybody's going back north." And the parent, careful not to insult by offering guidance over the long route they came half the young one's life ago, says, "Yes, I've been thinking about it myself. It certainly would be nice to have you with us. Your sister's in the other room, packing."

And so by ones, twos, and threes, the people abandon the city. The exodus is a long process, without any order to it. Some people leave quite soon after the solstice, and others say about them, "What a hurry they're in," or, "Shennenne just has to get there first so she can grab the old homesite." Some people linger in the city till it is almost empty, and still can't make up their mind to leave the hot and silent streets, the sad, shadeless, deserted squares that were so full of crowds and music all through the long half year. But first and last they all set out on the roads that lead north. And once they go, they go with speed. Most carry with them only what they can carry in a backpack or load on a ruba (from Kergemmeg's description, rubac are something like small, feathered donkeys). Some of the traders who have become wealthy during the desert season start out with whole trains of rubac loaded with goods and treasures. Though most people travel alone or in a small family group, on the more popular roads they follow pretty close after one another. Larger groups form temporarily in places where the going is hard and the older and weaker people need help gathering and carrying food. There are no children on the road north.

Kergemmeg did not know how many Ansarac there are but guessed some hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million. All of them join the migration.

As they go up into the mountainous Middle Lands, they do not bunch together, but spread out onto hundreds of different tracks, some taken by many, others by only a few, some clearly marked, others so cryptic that only people who have been on them before could ever trace the turnings.

"That's when it's good to have a three-year-old along," Kergemmeg said.

"Somebody who's been up the way twice." They travel very light and very fast. They live off the land except in the arid heights of the mountains, where, as he said, "They lighten their packs." And up in those passes and high canyons, the hard-driven rubac of the traders' caravans begin to stumble and tremble, perishing of exhaustion and cold. If a trader still tries to drive them on, people on the road unload them and loose them and let their own pack beast go with them. The little animals limp and scramble southward, back down to the desert. The goods they carried end up strewn along the wayside for anyone to take; but nobody takes anything, except a little food at need. They don't want stuff to carry, to slow them down. Spring is coming, cool spring, sweet spring, to the valleys of grass and the forests, the lakes, the bright rivers of the north, and they want to be there when it comes.

Listening to Kergemmeg, I imagined that if one could see the migration from above, see those people all threading along a thousand paths and trails, it would be like watching our northwest coast in spring a century or two ago when every stream, from the mile-wide Columbia to the tiniest creek, turned red with the salmon run.

The salmon spawn and die when they reach their goal, and some of the Ansarac are going home to die, too: those on their third migration north, the three-year-olds, whom we would see as people of seventy and over. Some of them don't make it all the way. Worn out by privation and hard going, they drop behind. If people pass an old man or woman sitting by the road, they may speak a word or two, help to put up a little shelter, leave a gift of food, but they do not urge the elder to come with them. If the elder is very weak or ill they may wait a night or two, until perhaps another migrant takes their place. If they find an old person dead by the roadside, they bury the body. On its back, with the feet to the north: going home.

There are many, many graves along the roads north, Kergemmeg said. Nobody has ever made a fourth migration.

The younger people, those on their first and second migrations, hurry on, crowded together in the high passes of the mountains, then spreading out ever wider on a myriad paths through the prairies as the Middle Lands widen out north of the mountains. By the time they reach the northland proper, the great rivers of people have tasseled out into thousands of rivulets, veering west and east, across the north. Coming to a pleasant hill country where the grass is already green and the trees are leafing, one of the little groups comes to a halt. "Well, here we are," says Mother. "Here it is." There are tears in her eyes and she laughs the soft, clacking laugh of the Ansarac. "Shuku, do you remember this place?"

And the daughter who was less than a half year old when she left this place—eleven or so, in our years—stares around with amazement and incredulity, and laughs, and cries, "But it was bigger than this!" Then perhaps Shuku looks across those half-familiar meadows of her birthplace to the just visible roof of the nearest neighbor and wonders if Kirmmmid and his father, who caught up to them and camped with them for a few nights and then went on ahead, were there already, living there, and if so, would Kimimmid come over to say hello?

For the people who lived so close-packed, in such sociable and ceaseless promiscuity in the Cities under the Sun, sharing rooms, sharing beds, sharing work and play, doing everything together in groups and crowds, now have all gone apart, family I from family, friend from friend, each to a small and separate house here in the meadowlands, or farther north in the rolling hills, or still farther north in the lakelands. But if they have all scattered like sand from a broken hourglass, the bonds that unite them have not broken, only changed. Now they come together not in groups and crowds, not in tens and hundreds and thousands, but by two and two.

"Well, here you are!" says Shuku's mother, as Shuku's father opens the door of the little house at the meadow's edge. "You must have been just a few days ahead of us."

"Welcome home," he says gravely. His eyes shine. The two adults take each other by the hand and slightly raise their narrow, beaked heads in a particular salute, an intimate yet formal greeting. Shuku suddenly remembers seeing them do that when she was a little girl, when they lived here, long ago. Here at the birthplace.

"Kimimmid was asking about you just yesterday," Father says to Shuku, and he softly clacks a laugh.

Spring is coming, spring is upon them. Now they will perform the ceremonies of the spring.

Kimimmid comes across the meadow to visit, and he and Shuku talk together, and walk together in the meadows and down by the stream. Presently, after a day or a week or two, he asks her if she would like to dance. "Oh, I don't know," she says, but seeing him stand tall and straight, his head thrown back a little, in the posture that begins the dance, she too stands up; at first her head is lowered, though she stands straight, arms at her sides; but then she wants to throw her head back, back, to reach her arms out wide, wide... to dance, to dance with him...

And what are Shuku's parents and Kimimmid's parents doing, in the kitchen garden or out in the old orchard, but the same thing? They face each other, they raise their proud and narrow heads, and then the man leaps, arms raised above his head, a great leap and a bow, a low bow... and the woman bows too... And so it goes, the courtship dance. All over the northern continent, now, the people are dancing.

Nobody interferes with the older couples, recourting, refashioning their marriage. But Kimimmid had better look out. A young man comes across the meadow one evening, a young man Shuku never met before; his birthplace is some miles away. He has heard of Shuku's beauty. He sits and talks with her. He tells her that he is building a new house, in a grove of trees, a pretty spot, nearer her home than his. He would like her advice on how to build the house. He would like very much to dance with her sometime. Maybe this evening, just for a little, just a step or two, before he goes away?

He is a wonderful dancer. Dancing with him on the grass in the late evening of early spring, Shuku feels that she is flying on a great wind, and she closes her eyes, her hands float out from her sides as if on that wind, and meet his hands...

Her parents will live together in the house by the meadow; they will have no more children, for that time is over for them, but they will make love as often as ever they did when they first were married. Shuku will choose one of her suitors, the new one, in fact. She goes to live with him and make love with him in the house they finish building together. Their building, their dancing, gardening, eating, sleeping, everything they do, turns into making love. And in due course Shuku is pregnant; and in due course she bears two babies. Each is born in a tough, white membrane or shell. Both parents tear this protective covering open with hands and beaks, freeing the tiny curled-up newborn, who lifts its infinitesimal beaklet and peeps blindly, already gaping, greedy for food, for life. The second baby, smaller, is not greedy, does not thrive. Though Shuku and her husband both feed her with tender care, and though Shuku's mother comes to stay and feeds the little one from her own beak and rocks her endlessly when she cries, still she pines and weakens. One morning lying in her grandmother's arms the infant twists and gasps for breath, and then is still. The grandmother weeps bitterly, remembering Shuku's baby brother, who did not live even this long, and tries to comfort Shuku. The baby's father digs a small grave out back of the new house, among the budding trees of the long springtime, and the tears fall from his eyes as he digs. But the other baby, the big girl, Kikirri, chirps and clacks and eats and thrives.

About the time Kikirri is hauling herself upright and shouting "Da!" at her father and "Ma!" at her mother and grandmother and "No!" when told to stop what she is doing, Shuku has another baby. Like many second conceptions, it is a singleton. A fine boy, small, but greedy. He grows fast. He will be the last of Shuku's children. She and her husband will make love still, whenever they please, in all the delight and ease of the time of flowering and the time of fruit, in the warm days and the mild nights, in the cool under the trees and out in the buzzing heat of the meadow in summer noontime, but it will be, as they say, luxury love; nothing will come of it but love itself.

Children are born to the Ansarac only in the early northern spring, soon after they have returned to their birthplace. Some couples bring up four children, and many three; but often, if the first two thrive, there is no second conception.

"You are spared our curse of overbreeding," I said to Kergemmeg when he had told me all this. And he agreed, when I told him a little about my plane.

But he did not want me to think that an Ansar has no sexual or reproductive choice at all. Pair bonding is the rule, but human will and contrariness change and bend and break it, and he talked about those exceptions. Many pair bonds are between two men or two women. Such couples and others who are childless are often given a baby by a couple who have three or four, or take on an orphaned child and bring it up. There are people who take no mate and people who take several mates at one time or in sequence. There is of course adultery. And there is rape. It is bad to be a girl among the last migrants coming up from the south, for the sexual drive is already strong in such stragglers, and young women are all too often gang-raped and arrive at their birthplace brutalised, mateless, and pregnant. A man who finds no mate or is dissatisfied with his wife may leave home and go off as a peddler of needles and thread or as a tool sharpener and tinker; such wanderers are welcomed for their goods but mistrusted as to their motives.

When we had talked together through several of those glimmering purple evenings on the veranda in the soft sea breeze, I asked Kergemmeg about his own life. He had followed Madan, the rule, the Way, in all respects but one, he said. He mated after his first migration north. His wife bore two children, both from the first conception, a girl and a boy, who of course went south with them in due time. The whole family rejoined for his second migration north, and both children had married close by, so that he knew his five grandchildren well. He and his wife had spent most of their third season in the south in different cities; she, a teacher of astronomy, had gone farther south to the Observatory, while he stayed in Terke Keter to study with a group of philosophers. She died very suddenly of a heart attack. He attended her funeral. Soon after that he made the trek back north with his son and grandchildren. "I didn't miss her till I came back home," he said, factually. "But to come there to our house, to live there without her—that wasn't something I could do. I happened to hear that someone was needed to greet the strangers on this island. I had been thinking about the best way to die, and this seemed a sort of halfway point. An island in the middle of the ocean, with not another soul of my people on it... not quite life, not quite death. The idea amused me. So I am here." He was well over three Ansar years old; getting on for eighty in our years, though only the slight stoop of his shoulders and the pure silver of his crest showed his age.

The next night he told me about the southern migration, describing how a man of the Ansarac feels as the warm days of the northern summer begin to wane and shorten. All the work of harvest is done, the grain stored in airtight bins for next year, the slow-growing edible roots planted to winter through and be ready in the spring; the children are shooting up tall, active, increasingly restless and bored by life on the homeplace, more and more inclined to wander off and make friends with the neighbors'

children. Life is sweet here but the same, always the same, and luxury love has lost its urgency. One night, a cloudy night with a chill in the air, your wife in bed next to you sighs and murmurs, "You know? I miss the city." And it comes back to you in a great wave of light and warmth—the crowds, the deep streets and high houses packed with people, the Year Tower high above it all—the sports arenas blazing with sunlight, the squares at night full of lantern lights and music where you sit at the cafe tables and drink ii and talk and talk halfway to morning—the old friends, friends you haven't thought of all this time—and strangers—how long has it been since you saw a new face? How long since you heard a new idea, had a new thought? Time for the city, time to follow the sun!

"Dear," the mother says, "we can't take all your rock collection south, just pick out the most special ones," and the child protests, "But I'll carry them! I promise!" Forced at last to yield, she finds a special, secret place for her rocks till she comes back, never imagining that by next year, when she comes back home, she won't care about her childish rock collection, and scarcely aware that she has begun to think constantly of the great journey and the unknown lands ahead. The city! What do you do in the city? Are there rock collections?

"Yes," Father says. "In the museum. Very fine collections. They'll take you to see all the museums when you're in school." School?

"You'll love it," Mother says with absolute certainty.

"School is the best good time in the world," says Aunt Kekki. "I loved school so much, I think I'm going to teach school, this year." The migration south is quite a different matter from the migration north. It is not a scattering but a grouping, a gathering. It is not haphazard but orderly, planned by all the families of a region for many days beforehand. They set off together, five or ten or fifteen families, and camp together at night. They bring plenty of food with them in handcarts and barrows, cooking utensils, fuel for fires in the treeless plains, warm clothing for the mountain passes, and medicines for illness along the way. There are no old people on the southward migration—nobody over seventy or so in our years. Those who have made three migrations stay behind. They group together in fafm-steads or the small towns that have grown around the farmsteads, or they live out the end of their life with their mate^ or alone, in the house where they lived the springs and summers of their lives. (I think what Kergemmeg meant, when he said he had followed his people's Way in all ways but one, was that he had not stayed home but had come to the island.) The "winter parting," as it is called, between the young going south and the old staying home is painful. It is stoical. It is as it must be.

Only those who stay behind will ever see the glory of autumn in the northern lands, the blue length of dusk, the first faint patterns of ice on the lake. Some have made paintings or left letters describing these things for the children and grandchildren they will not see again. Most die before the long, long darkness and cold of winter. None survive it. Each migrating group, as it comes down towards the Middle Lands, is joined by others coming from east and west, till at night the twinkle of campfires covers the great prairie from horizon to horizon. The people sing at the campfires, and the quiet singing hovers in the darkness between the little fires and the stars.

They don't hurry on the southward journey. They drift along easily, not far each day, though they keep moving. As they reach the foothills of the mountains, the great masses split again onto many different paths, thinning out, for it's pleasanter to be few on a trail than to come after great numbers of people and trudge in the dust and litter they leave. Up in the heights and passes where there are only a few ways to go, they have to come together again. They make the best of it, with cheerful greetings and offers to share food, fire, shelter. Everyone is kind to the children, the half-year-olds, who find the steep mountain paths hard going and often frightening; they slow their pace for the children.

And one evening when it seems they have been struggling in the mountains forever, they come through a high, stony pass to the outlook—South Face, or the Godsbeak Rocks, or the Tor. There they stand and look out and out and down and down to the golden, sunlit levels of the south, the endless fields of wild grain, and some far, faint, purple smudges—the walls and towers of the Cities under the Sun. On the downhill road they go faster, and eat lighter, and the dust of their going is a great cloud behind them.

They come to the cities—there are nine of them; Terke Keter is the largest—standing full of sand and silence and sunlight. They pour in through the gates and doors, they fill the streets, they light the lanterns, they draw water from the brimming wells, they throw their bedding down in empty rooms, they shout from window to window and from roof to roof. Life in the cities is so different from life in the homesteads that the children can't believe it; they are disturbed and dubious; they disapprove. It is so noisy, they complain. It's hot. There isn't anywhere to be alone, they say. They weep, the first nights, from homesickness. But they go off to school as soon as the schools are organised, and there they meet everybody else their age, all of them disturbed and dubious and disapproving and shy and eager and wild with excitement. Back home, they all learned to read and write and do arithmetic, just as they learned carpentry and farming, taught by their parents; but here are advanced classes, libraries, museums, galleries of art, concerts of music, teachers of art, of literature, of mathematics, of astronomy, of architecture, of philosophy—here are sports of all kinds, games, gymnastics, and somewhere in the city every night there is a round dance—above all, here is everybody else in the world, all crowded into these yellow walls, all meeting and talking and working and thinking together in an endless ferment of mind and occupation.

The parents seldom stay together in the cities. Life there is not lived by twos but in groups. They drift apart, following friends, pursuits, professions, and see each other now and then. The children stay at first with one parent or the other, but after a while they too want to be on their own and go off to live in one of the warrens of young people, the communal houses, the dormitories of the colleges. Young men and women live together, as do grown men and women. Gender is not of much import where there is no sexuality.

For they do everything under the sun in the Cities under the Sun, except make love.

They love, they hate, they learn, they make, they think hard, work hard, play; they enjoy passionately and suffer desperately, they live a full and human life, and they never give a thought to sex—unless, as Kergemmeg said with a perfect poker face, they are philosophers. Their achievements, their monuments as a people, are all in the Cities under the Sun, whose towers and public buildings, as I saw in a book of drawings Kergemmeg showed me, vary from stern purity to fervent magnificence. Their books are written there, their thought and religion took form there over the centuries. Their history, their continuity as a culture, is all there.

Their continuity as living beings is what they see to in the north. Kergemmeg said that while they are in the south they do not miss their sexuality at all. I had to take him at his word, which was given, hard as it might be for us to imagine, simply as a statement of fact. And as I try to tell here what he told me, it seems wrong to describe their life in the cities as celibate or chaste: for those words imply a forced or willed resistance to desire. Where there is no desire there is no resistance, no abstinence, but rather what one might call, in a radical sense of the word, innocence. Their marital life is an empty memory to them, meaningless. If a couple stays together or meets often in the south it is because they are uncommonly good friends—because they love each other. But they love their other friends too. They never live separately from other people. There is little privacy in the great apartment houses of the cities—nobody cares about it. Life there is communal, active, sociable, gregarious, and full of pleasures.

But slowly the days grow warmer, the air drier; there is a restlessness in the air. The shadows begin to fall differently. And the crowds gather in the streets to hear the Year Priests announce the solstice and watch the sun stop, and pause, and turn south.

People leave the cities, one here, a couple there, a family there... It has begun to stir again, that soft hormonal buzz in the blood, that first vague yearning intimation or memory, the body's knowledge of its kingdom coming.

The young people follow that knowledge blindly, without knowing they know it. The married couples are drawn back together by all their wakened memories, intensely sweet. To go home, to go home and be there together!

All they learned and did all those thousands of days and nights in the cities is left behind them, packed up, put away. Till they come back south again...

"That is why it was easy to turn us aside," Kergemmeg said. "Because our lives in the north and the south are so different that they seem, to you others, incoherent, incomplete. And we cannot connect them rationally. We cannot explain or justify our Madan to those who live only one kind of life. When the Bayderac came to our plane, they told us our Way was mere instinct and that we lived like animals. We were ashamed." (I later checked Kergemmeg's "Bayderac" in the Encyclopedia Planaria, where I found an entry for the Beidr, of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean "of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.")

Kergemmeg spoke of them with a kind of pain. It changed his voice, tightened it. He had been a child when they arrived— the first visitors, as it happened, from another plane. He had thought about them the rest of his life.

"They told us we should take control of our lives. We should not live two separate half lives but live fully all the time, all the year, as all intelligent beings do. They were a great people, full of knowledge, with high sciences and great ease and luxury of life. To them we truly were little more than animals. They told us and showed us how other people lived on other planes. We saw we were foolish to do without the pleasure of sex for half our life. We saw we were foolish to spend so much time and energy going between south and north on foot, when we could make ships, or roads and cars, or airplanes, and go back and forth a hundred times a year if we liked. We saw we could build cities in the north and make homesteads in the south. Why not? Our Madan was wasteful and irrational, a mere animal impulse controlling us. All we had to do to be free of it was take the medicines the Bayderac gave us. And our children need not take medicines, but could have their being altered by the genetic science of Bayder. Then we could be without rest from sexual desire until we got very old, like the Bayderac. And then a woman would be able to get pregnant at any time before her menopause—in the south, even. And the number of her children would not be limited ... They were eager to give us these medicines. We knew their doctors were wise. As soon as they came to us, they had given us treatments for some of our illnesses that cured people as if by a miracle. They knew so much. We saw them fly about in their airplanes, and envied them, and were ashamed.

"They brought machines for us. We tried to drive the cars they gave us on our narrow, rocky roads. They sent engineers to direct us, and we began to build a huge highway straight through the Middle Lands. We blew up mountains with the explosives the Bayderac gave us so the highway could run wide and level, south to north and north to south. My father was a workman on the highway. There were thousands of men working on that road, for a while. Men from the southern homesteads ... Only men. Women were not asked to go and do that work. Bayder women did not do such work. Women were to stay home with the children, they told us, while men did the work."

Kergemmeg sipped his ii thoughtfully and gazed off at the glimmering sea and the star-dusted sky.

"Women went down from the homesteads and talked to the men," he said. "They said to listen to them, not only to the Bayderac ... Perhaps women don't feel shame the way men do. Perhaps their shame is different, more a matter of the body than the mind. They didn't care much for the cars and airplanes and bulldozers but cared a great deal about the medicines that would change us and the rules about who did which kind of work. After all, with us, the woman bears the child, but both parents feed it, both nurture it. Why should a child be left to the mother only?

They asked that. How could a woman alone bring up four children? Or more than four children? It was inhuman. And then, in the cities, why should families stay together? The child doesn't want its parents then, the parents don't want the child, they all have other things to do... The women talked about this to us men, and with them we tried to talk about it to the Bayderac.

"They said, 'All that will change. You will see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your hormones, your genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you will be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns.'

"We answered, 'But will we be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns?'

"Men working on the highway began throwing down their tools and abandoning the big machines the Bayderac had provided. They said,

'What do we need this highway for when we have a thousand ways of our own?' And they set off southward on those old paths and trails.

"You see, all this happened—fortunately, I think—near the end of a northern season. In the north, where we all live apart, and so much of life is spent in courting and making love and bringing up the children, we were—how shall I put it—more shortsighted, more impressionable, more vulnerable. We had just begun the drawing together, then. When we came to the south, when we were all in the Cities under the Sun, we could gather, take counsel together, argue and listen to arguments, and consider what was best for us as a people.

"After we had done that, and had talked further with the Bayderac and let them talk to us, we called for a Great Consensus, such as is spoken of in the legends and the ancient records of the Year Towers where history is kept. Every Ansar came to the Year Tower of their city and voted on this choice: Shall we follow the Bayder Way or the Manad? If we followed their Way, they were to stay among us; if we chose our own, they were to go. We chose our Way." His beak clattered very softly as he laughed. "I was a half-yearling, that season. I cast my vote."

I did not have to ask how he had voted, but I asked if the Bayderac had been willing to go.

"Some of them argued, some of them threatened," he said. "They talked about their wars and their weapons. I am sure they could have destroyed us utterly. But they did not. Maybe they despised us so much they didn't want to bother. Or their wars called them away. By then we had been visited by people from the Interplanary Agency, and most likely it was their doing that the Bayderac left us in peace. Enough of us had been alarmed that we agreed then, in another voting, that we wanted no more visitors. So now the Agency sees to it that they come only to this island. I am not sure we made the right choice, there. Sometimes I think we did, sometimes I wonder. Why are we afraid of other peoples, other Ways?

They can't all be like the Bayderac."

"I think you made the right choice," I said. "But I say it against my will. I'd like so much to meet an Ansar woman, to meet your children, to see the Cities under the Sun! I'd like so much to see your dancing!"

"Oh, well, that you can see," he said, and stood up. Maybe we had had a little more than usual, that night.

He stood very tall there in the glimmering darkness on the veranda over the beach. He straightened his shoulders, and his head went back. The crest on his head slowly rose into a stiff plume, silver in the starlight. He lifted his arms above his head.

It was the pose of the antique Spanish dancer, fiercely elegant, tense, and masculine. He did not leap, he was after all a man of eighty, but he gave somehow the impression of a leap, then a deep graceful bow. His beak clicked out a quick double rhythm, he stamped twice, and his feet seemed to flicker in a complex set of steps while his upper body remained taut and straight. Then his arms came out in a great embracing gesture, towards me, as I sat almost terrified by the beauty and intensity of his dance.

And then he stopped, and laughed. He was out of breath. He sat down and passed his hand over his forehead and his crest, panting a little. "After all," he said, "it isn't courting season." 

SOCIAL DREAMING OF THE FRIN

Note: much of the information for this piece comes from AnOneirological Survey on the Frinthian Plane, published by Mills CollegePress, and from conversations with Frinthian scholars and friends. ON THE FRINTHIAN PLANE, dreams are not private property. A troubled Frin has no need to lie on a couch recounting dreams to a psychoanalyst, for the doctor already knows what the patient dreamed last night, because the doctor dreamed it too; and the patient also dreamed what the doctor dreamed; and so did everyone else in the neighborhood. To escape from the dreams of others or to have a private, a secret dream, the Frin must go out alone into the wilderness. And even in the wilderness, their sleep may be invaded by the strange dream visions of lions, antelope, bears, or mice.

While awake, and during much of their sleep, the Frin are as dream-deaf as we are. Only sleepers who are in or approaching REM sleep can participate in the dreams of others also in REM sleep. REM is an acronym for "rapid eye movement," a visible accompaniment of this stage of sleep; its signal in the brain is a characteristic type of electroencephalic wave. Most of our re-memberable dreams occur during REM sleep.

Frinthian REM sleep and that of people on our plane yield very similar EEG traces, though there are some significant differences, in which may lie the key to the Frinthian ability to share dreams.

To share, the dreamers must be fairly close to one another. The carrying power of the average Frinthian dream is about that of the average human voice. A dream can be received easily within a hundred-meter radius, and bits and fragments of it may carry a good deal farther. A strong dream in a solitary place may well carry for two kilometers or even farther. In a lonely farmhouse a Frin's dreams mingle only with those of the rest of the family, along with echoes, whiffs, and glimpses of what the cattle in the barn and the dog dozing on the doorstop hear, smell, and see in their sleep.

In a village or town, with people asleep in all the houses around, the Frin spend at least part of every night in a shifting phantasmagoria of their own and other people's dreams which I find hard to imagine. I asked an acquaintance in a small town to tell me any dreams she could recall from the past night. At first she demurred, saying that they'd all been nonsense, and only "strong" dreams ought to be thought about and talked over. She was evidently reluctant to tell me, an outsider, things that had been going on in her neighbors' heads. I managed at last to convince her that my interest was genuine and not voyeuristic. She thought a while and said, "Well, there was a woman—it was me in the dream, or sort of me, but I think it was the mayor's wife's dream, actually, they live at the corner—this woman, anyhow, and she was trying to find a baby that she'd had last year. She had put the baby into a dresser drawer and forgotten all about it, and now I was, she was, feeling worried about it— Had it had anything to eat? Since last year? Oh my word, how stupid we are in dreams! And then, oh, yes, then there was an awful argument between a naked man and a dwarf, they were in an empty cistern. That may have been my own dream, at least to start with. Because I know that cistern. It was on my grandfather's farm where I used to stay when I was a child. But they both turned into lizards, I think. And then—oh yes!" She laughed. "I was being squashed by a pair of giant breasts, huge ones, with pointy nipples. I think that was the teenage boy next door, because I was terrified but kind of ecstatic, too. And what else was there? Oh, a mouse, it looked so delicious, and it didn't know I was there, and I was just about to pounce, but then there was a horrible thing, a nightmare—a face without any eyes—and huge, hairy hands groping at me—and then I heard the three-year-old next door screaming, because I woke up too. That poor child has so many nightmares, she drives us all crazy. Oh, I don't really like thinking about that one. I'm glad we forget most dreams. Wouldn't it be awful if we had to remember them all!"

Dreaming is a cyclical, not a continuous activity, and so in small communities there are hours when one's sleep theater, if one may call it so, is dark. REM sleep among settled, local groups of Frin tends to synchronise. As the cycles peak, about five times a night, several or many dreams may be going on simultaneously in everybody's head, intermingling and influencing one another with their mad, inarguable logic, so that (as my friend in the village described it) the baby turns up in the cistern and the mouse hides between the breasts, while the eyeless monster disappears in the dust kicked up by a pig trotting past through a new dream, perhaps a dog's, since the pig is rather dimly seen but is smelled with great particularity. But after such episodes comes a period when everyone can sleep in peace, without anything exciting happening at all.

In Frinthian cities, where one may be within dream range of hundreds of people every night, the layering and overlap of insubstantial imagery is, I'm told, so continual and so confusing that the dreams cancel out, like brushfuls of colors slapped one over the other without design; even one's own dream blurs at once into the meaningless commotion, as if projected on a screen where a hundred films are already being shown, their soundtracks all running together. Only occasionally does a gesture, a voice, ring clear for a moment, or a particularly vivid wet dream or ghastly nightmare cause all the sleepers in a neighborhood to sigh, ejaculate, shudder, or wake up with a gasp.

Frin whose dreams are mostly troubling or disagreeable say they like living in the city for the very reason that their dreams are all but lost in the "stew," as they call it. But others are upset by the constant oneiric noise and dislike spending even a few nights in a metropolis. "I hate to dream strangers' dreams!" my village informant told me. "Ugh! When I come back from staying in the city, I wish I could wash out the inside of my head!"

Even on our plane, young children often have trouble understanding that the experiences they had just before they woke up aren't "real." It must be far more bewildering for Frinthian children, into whose innocent sleep enter the sensations and preoccupations of adults—accidents relived, griefs renewed, rapes reenacted, wrathful conversations held with people fifty years in the grave.

But adult Frin are ready to answer children's questions about the shared dreams and to discuss them, defining them always as dream, though not as unreal. There is no word corresponding to "unreal" in Frinthian; the nearest is "bodiless." So the children learn to live with adults' incomprehensible memories, unmentionable acts, and inexplicable emotions, much as do children who grow up on our plane amid the terrible incoherence of civil war or in times of plague and famine; or, indeed, children anywhere, at any time. Children learn what is real and what isn't, what to notice and what to ignore, as a survival tactic. It is hard for an outsider to judge, but my impression of Frinthian children is that they mature early, psychologically. By the age of seven or eight they are treated by adults as equals.

As for the animals, no one knows what they make of the human dreams they evidently participate in. The domestic beasts of the Frin seemed to me to be remarkably pleasant, trustful, and intelligent. They are generally well looked after. The fact that the Frin share their dreams with their animals might explain why they use animals to haul and plow and for milk and wool, but not as meat.

The Frin say that animals are more sensitive dream receivers than human beings and can receive dreams even from people from other planes. Frinthian farmers have assured me that their cattle and swine are deeply disturbed by the visits of people from carnivorous planes. When I stayed at a farm in Enya Valley the chicken house was in an uproar half the night. I thought it was a fox, but my hosts said it was me. People who have mingled their dreams all their lives say they are often uncertain where a dream began, whether it was originally theirs or somebody else's; but within a family or village the author of a particularly erotic or ridiculous dream may be all too easily identified. People who know one another well can recognise the source dreamer from the tone or events of the dream, from its style. Still, it has become their own as they dream it. Each dream may be shaped differently in each mind. And, as with us, the personality of the dreamer, the oneiric I, is often tenuous, strangely disguised, or unpredictably different from the daylight person. Very puzzling dreams or those with powerful emotional affect may be discussed on and off all day by the community, without the origin of the dream ever being mentioned.

But most dreams, as with us, are forgotten at waking. Dreams elude their dreamers on every plane.

It might seem to us that the Frin have very little psychic privacy; but they are protected by this common amnesia, as well as by doubt as to any particular dream's origin and by the obscurity of dream itself. Their dreams are truly common property. The sight of a red-and-black bird pecking at the ear of a bearded human head lying on a plate on a marble table and the rush of almost gleeful horror that accompanied it—did that come from Aunt Unia's sleep, or Uncle Tu's, or Grandfather's, or the cook's, or the girl next door's? A child might ask, "Auntie, did you dream that head?" The stock answer is, "We all did." Which is, of course, the truth.

Frinthian families and small communities are close-knit and generally harmonious, though quarrels and feuds occur. The research group from Mills College that traveled to the Frinthian plane to record and study oneiric brain-wave synchrony agreed that like the synchronisation of menstrual and other cycles within groups on our plane, the communal dreaming of the Frin may serve to establish and strengthen the social bond. They did not speculate as to its psychological or moral effects. From time to time a Frin is born with unusual powers of projecting and receiving dreams—never one without the other. The Frin call such a dreamer whose signal is unusually clear and powerful a strong mind. That strong-minded dreamers can receive dreams from non-Frinthian humans is a proven fact. Some of them apparently can share dreams with fish, with insects, even with trees. A legendary strong mind named Du Ir claimed that he "dreamed with the mountains and the rivers," but his boast is generally regarded as poetry.

Strong minds are recognised even before birth, when the mother begins to dream that she lives in a warm, amber-colored palace without directions or gravity, full of shadows and complex rhythms and musical vibrations, and shaken often by slow peaceful earthquakes—a dream the whole community enjoys, though late in the pregnancy it may be accompanied by a sense of pressure, of urgency, that rouses claustrophobia in some.

As the strong-minded child grows, its dreams reach two or three times farther than those of ordinary people, and tend to override or co-opt local dreams going on at the same time. The nightmares and inchoate, passionate deliria of a strong-minded child who is sick, abused, or unhappy can disturb everyone in the neighborhood, even in the next village. Such children, therefore, are treated with care; every effort is made to make their life one of good cheer and disciplined serenity. If the family is incompetent or uncaring, the village or town may intervene, the whole community earnestly seeking to ensure the child peaceful days and nights of pleasant dreams.

"World-strong minds" are legendary figures, whose dreams supposedly came to everyone in the world, and who therefore also dreamed the dreams of everyone in the world. Such men and women are revered as holy people, ideals and models for the strong dreamers of today. The moral pressure on strong-minded people is in fact intense, and so must be the psychic pressure. None of them lives in a city: they would go mad, dreaming a whole city's dreams. Mostly they gather in small communities where they live very quietly, widely dispersed from one another at night, practicing the art of "dreaming well," which mostly means dreaming harmlessly. But some of them become guides, philosophers, visionary leaders.

There are still many tribal societies on the Frinthian plane, and the Mills researchers visited several. They reported that among these peoples, strong minds are regarded as seers or shamans, with the usual perquisites and penalties of such eminence. If during a famine the tribe's strong mind dreams of traveling clear down the river and feasting by the sea, the whole tribe may share the vision of the journey and the feast so vividly, with such conviction, that they decide to pack up and start downriver. If they find food along the way, or shellfish and edible seaweeds on the beach, their strong mind gets rewarded with the choice bits; but if they find nothing or run into trouble with other tribes, the seer, now called "the twisted mind," may be beaten or driven out.

The elders told the researchers that tribal councils usually follow the guidance of dream only if other indications favor it. The strong minds themselves urge caution. A seer among the Eastern Zhud-Byu told the researchers, "This is what I say to my people: Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known."

Frinthia has been open to other planes for over a century, but the rural scenery and quiet lifestyle have brought no great influx of visitors. Many tourists avoid the plane under the impression that the Frin are a race of

"mindsuckers" and "psychovoyeurs." Most Frin are still farmers, villagers, or town dwellers, but the cities and their material technologies are growing fast. Though technologies and techniques can be imported only with the permission of the All-Frin government, requests for such permission by Frinthian companies and individuals have become increasingly frequent. Many Frin welcome this growth of urbanism and materialism, justifying it as the result of the interpretation of dreams received by their strong minds from visitors from other planes. "People came here with strange dreams," says the historian Tubar of Kaps, himself a strong mind. "Our strongest minds joined in them, and joined us with them. So we all began to see things we had never dreamed of. Vast gatherings of people, cybernets, ice cream, much commerce, many pleasant belongings and useful artifacts. 'Shall these remain only dreams?' we said. 'Shall we not bring these things into wakeful being?' So we have done that."

Other thinkers take a more dubious attitude towards alien hypnogogia. What troubles them most is that the dreaming is not reciprocal. For though a strong mind can share the dreams of an alien visitor and

"broadcast" them to other Frin, nobody from another plane has been capable of sharing the dreams of the Frin. We cannot enter their nightly festival of fantasies. We are not on their wavelength. The investigators from Mills hoped to be able to reveal the mechanism by which communal dreaming is effected, but they failed, as Frinthian scientists have also failed, so far. "Telepathy," much hyped in the literature of the interplanary travel agents, is a label, not an explanation. Researchers have established that the genetic programming of all Frinthian mammals includes the capacity for dream sharing, but its operation, though clearly linked to the brain-wave synchrony of sleepers, remains obscure. Visiting foreigners do not synchronise; they do not participate in that nightly ghost chorus of electric impulses dancing to the same beat. But unwittingly, unwillingly— like a deaf child shouting—they send out their own dreams to the strong minds asleep nearby. And to many of the Frin, this seems not so much a sharing as a pollution or infection.

"The purpose of our dreams," says the philosopher Sorr-dja of Farfrit, a strong dreamer of the ancient Deyu Retreat, "is to enlarge our souls by letting us imagine all that can be imagined: to release us from the tyranny and bigotry of the individual self by letting us feel the fears, desires, and delights of every mind in every living body near us." The duty of the strong-minded person, she holds, is to strengthen dreams, to focus them—not with a view to practical results or new inventions but as a means of understanding the world through a myriad of experiences and sentiences (not only human). The dreams of the greatest dreamers may offer to those who share them a glimpse of an order underlying all the chaotic stimuli, responses, acts, words, intentions, and imaginings of daily and nightly existence.

"In the day we are apart," she says. "In the night we are together. We should follow our own dreams, not those of strangers who cannot join us in the dark. With such people we can talk; we can learn from them and teach them. We should do so, for that is the way of the daylight. But the way of the night is different. We go together then, apart from them. The dream we dream is our road through the night. They know our day, but not our night, nor the ways we go there. Only we can find our own way, showing one another, following the lantern of the strong mind, following our dreams in darkness."

The resemblance of Sorrdja's phrase "road through the night" to Freud's "royal road to the unconscious" is interesting but, I believe, superficial. Visitors from my plane have discussed psychological theory with the Frin, but neither Freud's nor Jung's views of dream are of much interest to them. The Frinthian "royal road" is trodden not by one secret soul but by a multitude. Repressed feelings, however distorted, disguised, and symbolic, are the common property of everybody in one's household and neighborhood. The Frinthian unconscious, collective or individual, is not a dark wellspring buried deep under years of evasions and denials, but a kind of great moonlit lake to whose shores everybody comes to swim together naked every night.

And so the interpretation of dreams is not, among the Frin, a means of self-revelation, of private psychic inquiry and readjustment. It is not even species-specific, since animals share the dreams, though only the Frin can talk about them.

For them, dream is a communion of all the sentient creatures in the world. It puts the notion of self deeply into question. I can imagine only that for them to fall asleep is to abandon the self utterly, to enter or reenter the limitless community of being, almost as death is for us. 

THE ROYALS OF HEGN

HEGN IS A SMALL, COZY PLANE, blessed with a marvelous climate and a vegetation so rich that lunch or dinner there consists of reaching up to a tree to pluck a succulent, sun-warmed, ripe, rare steakfruit, or sitting down under a llumbush and letting the buttery morsels drop onto one's lap or straight into one's mouth. And then for dessert there are the sorbice blossoms, tart, sweet, and crunchy.

Four or five centuries ago the Hegnish were evidently an enterprising, stirring lot, who built good roads, fine cities, noble country houses and palaces, all surrounded by literally delicious gardens. Then they entered a settling-down phase, and at present they simply live in their beautiful houses. They have hobbies, pursued with tranquil obsession. Some take up the cultivation and breeding of ever finer varieties of grape. (The Hegnian grape is self-fermenting; a small cluster of them has the taste, scent, and effect of a split of Veuve Clicquot. Left longer on the vine, the grapes reach 80 or 90 proof, and the taste comes to resemble single-malt whiskey.) Some raise pet gorkis, an amiable, short-legged domestic animal; others embroider pretty hangings for the churches; many take their pleasure in sports. They all enjoy social gatherings.

People dress nicely for these parties. They eat a few grapes, dance a little, and talk. Conversation is desultory and, some would say, vapid. It concerns the kind and quality of the grapes, discussed with much technicality; the weather, which is usually settled fair but can always be threatening, or have threatened, to rain; and sports, particularly the characteristically Hegnish game of sutpot, which requires a playing field of several acres and involves two teams, many rules, a large ball, several small holes in the ground, a movable fence, a short, flat bat, two vaulting poles, four umpires, and several days. No non-Hegnish person has ever been able to understand sutpot. Hegnishmen discuss the last match played, with the same grave deliberation and relentless attention to detail with which they played it. Other subjects of conversation are the behavior of pet gorkis and the decoration of the local church. Religion and politics are never discussed. It may be that they do not exist, having been reduced to a succession of purely formal events and observances, while their place is filled by the central element, the focus and foundation of Hegnish society, which is best described as the Degree of Consanguinity. It is a small plane, and nearly everybody on it is related. As it is a monarchy, or rather a congeries of monarchies, this means that almost everybody is, or descended from, a monarch. Everybody is a member of the Royal Family.

In earlier times this universality of aristocracy caused trouble and dissension. Rival claimants to the crown tried to eliminate each other; there was a long period of violence referred to as the Purification of the Peerage, a war called the Agnate War, and the brief, bloody Cross-Cousins'

Revolt. But all these family quarrels were settled when the genealogies of ever)' lineage and individual were established and recorded in the great work of the reign of Eduber XII of Sparg, the Book of the Blood. Now 488 years old, this book is, I may say without exaggeration, the centerpiece of every Hegnish household. Indeed it is the only book anybody ever reads. Most people know the sections dealing with their own family by heart. Publication of the annual Addition and Supplements to the Book of the Blood is awaited as the great event of the year. It furnishes the staple of conversation for months, as people discuss the sad extinction of the Levigian House with the death of old Prince Levigvig; the exciting possibility of an heir to the Swads arising from the eminently suitable marriage of Endol IV and the Duchess of Mabuber; the unexpected succession of Viscount Lagn to the crown of East Fob due to the untimely deaths of his great-uncle, his uncle, and his cousin all in the same year; or the relegitimi-sation (by decree of the Board of Editors-Royal) of the great-grandson of the Bastard of Egmorg.

There are 817 kings in Hegn. Each has title to certain lands, or palaces, or at least parts of palaces; but actual rule or dominion over a region isn't what makes a king a king. What matters is having the crown and wearing it on certain occasions, such as the coronation of another king, and having one's lineage recorded unquestionably in the Book of the Blood, and edging the sod at the first game of the local sutpot season, and being present at the annual Blessing of the Fish, and knowing that one's wife is the queen and one's eldest son is the crown prince and one's brother is the prince royal and one's sister is the princess royal and all one's relations and all their children are of the blood royal.

To maintain an aristocracy it is necessary that persons of exalted rank form intimate association only with others of their kind. Fortunately there are plenty of those. Just as the bloodline of a Thoroughbred horse on my plane can be tracked straight back to the Godolphin Arabian, every royal family of Hegn can trace its descendance from Rugland of Hegn-Glander, who ruled eight centuries ago. The horses don't care, but their owners do, and so do the kings and the royal families. In this sense, Hegn may be seen as a vast stud farm.

There is an unspoken consensus that certain royal houses are slightly, as it were, more royal than others, because they descend directly from Rugland's eldest son rather than one of his eight younger sons; but all the other royal houses have married into the central line often enough to establish an unshakable connection. Each house also has some unique, incomparable claim to distinction, such as descent from Alfign the Ax, the semilegendary conqueror of North Hegn, or a collateral saint, or a family tree never sullied by marriage with a mere duke or duchess but exhibiting (on the ever-open page of the Book of the Blood in the palace library) a continuous and unadulterated flowering of true blue princes and princesses.

And so, when the novelty of the annual Addition and Supplements at last wears thin, the royal guests at the royal parties can always fall back on discussing degrees of consanguinity, settling such questions as whether the son born of Agnin IV's second marriage, to Tivand of Shut, was or was not the same prince who was slain at the age of thirteen defending his father's palace against the Anti-Agnates and therefore could, or could not, have been the father of the Duke of Vigrign, later King of Shut. Such questions are not of interest to everyone, and the placid fanaticism with which the Hegnish pursue them bores or offends many visitors to their plane. The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so. They do not, however, have to think about foreigners. That is taken care of for them. The Interplanary Hotel on Hegn is in Hemgogn, a beautiful little kingdom on the west coast. The Interplanary Agency runs the hotel and hires local guides. The guides, mostly dukes and earls, take visitors to see the Alternation of the Watch on the Walls, performed by princes of the blood, wearing magnificent traditional regalia, at noon and six daily. The Agency also offers day tours to a couple of other kingdoms. The bus runs softly along the ancient, indestructible roads among sunlit orchards and wildfood forests. The tourists get out of the bus and look at the ruins, or walk through the parts of the palace open to visitors. The inhabitants of the palace are aloof but unfailingly civil and courteous, as befits royalty. Perhaps the Queen comes down and smiles at the tourists without actually looking at them and instructs the pretty little Crown Princess to invite them to pick and eat whatever they like in the lunch orchard, and then she and the Princess go back into the private part of the palace, and the tourists have lunch and get back into the bus. And that is that. Being an introvert, I rather like Hegn. One does not have to mingle, since one can't. And the food is good, and the sunlight sweet. I went there more than once, and stayed longer than most people do, and so it happened that I learned about the Hegnish Commoners.

I was walking down the main street of Legners Royal, the capital of Hemgogn, when I saw a crowd in the square in front of the old Church of the Thrice Royal Martyr. I thought it must be one of the many annual festivals or rituals and joined the crowd to watch. These events are always slow, decorous, and profoundly dull. But they're the only events there are; and they have their own tedious charm. Soon, however, I saw this was a funeral. And it was altogether different from any Hegnish cere-^ mony I had ever witnessed, above all in the behavior of the people. They were all royals, of course, like any crowd in Hegn, all of them princes, dukes, earls, princesses, duchesses, countesses, etc. But they were not behaving with the regal reserve, the sovereign aplomb, the majestic apathy I had always seen in them before. They were standing about in the square, for once not engaged in any kind of prescribed ritual duty or traditional occupation or hobby, but just crowding together, as if for comfort. They were disturbed, distressed, disorganised, and verged upon being noisy. They showed emotion. They were grieving, openly grieving. The person nearest me in the crowd was the Dowager Duchess of Mogn and Farstis, the Queen's aunt by marriage. I knew who she was because I had seen her, every morning at half past eight, issue forth from the Royal Palace to walk the King's pet gorki in the palace gardens, which border on the hotel. One of the Agency guides had told me who she was. I had watched from the window of the breakfast room of the hotel while the gorki, a fine, heavily testicled specimen, relieved himself under the cheeseblossom bushes, and the Dowager Duchess gazed away into a tranquil vacancy reserved for the eyes of true aristocrats. But now those pale eyes were rilled with tears, and the soft, weathered face of the Duchess worked with the effort to control her feelings.

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

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

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

The coffin was carried and closely surrounded by people I had never seen before, a very odd lot—pale, fat men in cheap suits, pimply boys, middle-aged women with brassy hair and stiletto heels, and a highly visible young woman with thick thighs. She wore a miniskirt, a halter top, and a black cotton lace mantilla. She staggered along after the coffin, weeping aloud, half hysterical, supported on one side by a scared-looking man with a pencil mustache and two-tone shoes, on the other by a small, dry, tired, dogged woman in her seventies dressed entirely in rusty black. At the far edge of the crowd I saw a native guide with whom I had struck up a lightweight friendship, a young viscount, son of the Duke of 1st, and I worked my way towards him. It took quite a while, as everyone was streaming along with the slow procession of the coffin bearers and their entourage towards the King's limousines and horse-drawn coaches that waited near the palace gates. When I finally got to the guide, I said,

"Who is it? Who are they?"

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

"And Sissie-?"

"She's, she was, their daughter. The only daughter." Do what he could, the tears would well into his eyes. "She was such a dear girl. Such a help to her mother, always. Such a sweet smile. And there's nobody like her, nobody. She was the only one. Oh, she was so full of love. Our poor litde Sissie!" And he broke right down and cried aloud. At this moment the King and his sons and brother passed quite close to us. I saw that both the boys were weeping, and that the King's stony face betrayed a superhuman effort to maintain calm. His slighdy retarded brother appeared to be in a daze, holding tight to the King's arm and walking beside him like an automaton.

The crowd poured after the funeral procession. People pushed in closer, trying to touch the fringes of die white silk pall over the coffin. "Sissie!

Sissie!" voices cried. "Oh, Modier, we loved her too!" they cried. "Dad, Dad, what are we going to do without her? She's with the angels," the voices cried. "Don't cry, Mother, we love you! We'll always love you! Oh Sissie! Sissie! Our own sweet girl!"

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

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

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

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

She had always been delicate. The story was that she had fallen in love with young Prince Frodig, though he of course could never have married her. It was said they had been seen talking, once, more than once, near the Palace Bridge at twilight. My viscount clearly wanted to believe this but found it difficult, since Prince Frodig had been out of the country, at school in Halfvig, for three years. At any rate, Sissie had a weak chest.

"The commoners often do," the viscount said, "it's hereditary. Runs in the female line." She had gone into a decline, grown wan and pale, never complaining, always smiling but so thin and quiet, just faded away, from day to day, until she lay, in the cold cold clay, Sweet Sissie, the Wild Flower of Hemgogn.

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

I had to leave Hegn not long after this funeral. Other travels absorbed me for three or four years, and when I went back to the Kingdom of Hemgogn, the orgy of grief was long over. I looked up my viscount. He had given up playing at being a guide upon coming into his inheritance: the tide of Duke of 1st and an apartment in the New Wing of the Royal Palace, with usufruct of one of the Royal Vineyards, which furnished grapes for his parties.

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

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

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

I met a few royals who did not share the general adoration. Old Prince Foford took rather a liking to me, foreigner as I was. The King's first cousin and my friend the Duke's uncle, he prided himself on his unconventionality, his radical thinking. "Rebel of the Family, they call me," he said in his growly voice, his eyes twinkling among wrinkles. He raised flennis, not gorkis, and had no patience at all with the Commoners, not even Sissie. "Weak," he growled, "no stamina. No breeding. Flaunted herself about under the walls, hoping the Prince'd see her. Caught cold, died of it. Whole lot of 'em sickly. Sickly, ignorant beggars. Filthy houses. Put on a show, that's all they know how to do. Dirt, screeching, flinging pots, black eyes, foul language—all show. All humbug. Couple of dukes in that woodpile, back a generation or two. Know it for a fact." And indeed, as I took notice of the gossip, the bulletins, the photographs, and of the Commoners themselves as they went about the streets of Legners Royal, they did seem rather insistently, even blatantly lower-class: professional is perhaps the term I want. No doubt Chickie had not deliberately planned to be impregnated by her uncle, but when she was, she certainly made the most of it. She would tell any prince or princess with a notebook the woeful tale of how Uncle Tugg had squashed half-rotted grapes into her mouth till she was vomiting drunk and then tore off her clothes and screwed her. The story grew with the telling, getting more and more steamy and explicit. It was the thirteen-year-old Prince Hodo who wrote down Chickie's vivid words concerning the brutal weight of Uncle Tugg's hairy body and how even as she fought him her own body betrayed her, her nipples hardening and her thighs parting as he forced his, and here the prince put four asterisks, into her four asterisks. To one of the younger duchesses Chickie confessed that she had tried to get rid of the baby but hot baths were a bunch of crap and Grandma's herbs were a load of shit and you could kill yourself with knitting needles. Meanwhile Uncle Tugg went around boasting that the family had always called him Fuckemall, until his brother-in-law, Chickie's putative father (there was a good deal of doubt concerning Chickie's parentage, and Uncle Tugg himself may have been her father) lay in wait for him, attacked him from behind with a piece of lead pipe, and beat him senseless. The entire kingdom shuddered voluptuously when Uncle Tugg was discovered lying in a pool of blood and urine at the door of the family outhouse.

For the Gats and Tuggs had no plumbing, no running water, no electricity. The previous queen, in a misplaced fit of compassion or noblesse oblige, had had wiring installed in the main house of the ancient, filthy warren of hovels and sheds called the Commons, where snot-nosed urchins played in gutted automobiles and huge dogs lunged on short chains in endless frenzies of barking, trying to attack Great-Aunt Yoly's mangy sheep that wandered about among the stinking vats of Uncle Agby's tannery. The boys broke all the lightbulbs with their slingshots the first day. Gamma Gat would never use the electric oven, preferring to roast her breadfruit in the cavernous woodstove. Mice and rats ate the insulation and shorted out the circuits. The principal result of the electrification of the Commons was a lingering stink of fried rat. As a rule the Commoners avoided foreigners with blank inattention, just as the royals did. Now and then their patriotic bigotry boiled up and they threw garbage at tourists. Informed of this, the Palace always issued a brief statement of shock and dismay that Hegnishmen should so forget the hospitable traditions of the kingdom. But at the royal parties there was often a little satisfied sniggering and murmurs of "Gave the beggars a bit of daeir own, eh?" For after all, tourists were commoners; but they weren't our commoners.

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

I left before Chickie's baby was born, but royal attention was already centered on the coming event, and was only heightened by Chickie's frequent public announcements that she was sure the little bastard would be a drooling idiot born without any arms or legs or four asterisks, what else could you expect.

And the royal families of four kingdoms did not want to expect anything else. Fascinated, appalled, they looked forward to a genetic disaster, a tiny, monstrous plebeian to cluck and sigh and shudder over. I am sure Chickie did her duty and provided them one.

WOEFUL TALES FROM MAHIGUL

WHEN I'M IN MAHIGUL, a peaceful place nowadays though it has a bloody history, I spend most of my time at the Imperial Library. Many would consider this a dull thing to do when on another plane, or indeed anywhere; but I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library.

Most of the Library of Mahigul is outdoors. The archives, bookstacks, electronic storage units, and computers for the leg-emats are all housed underground in vaults where temperature and humidity can be controlled, but above this vast complex rise airy arcades forming walks and shelters around many plots and squares and parklands—the Reading Gardens of the Library. Some are paved courtyards, orderly and secluded, like a cloister. Others are broad parks with dells and little hills, groves of trees, open lawns, and grassy glades sheltered by hedges of flowering shrubs. All are very quiet. They're never crowded; one can talk with a friend, or have a group discussion; there's usually a poet shouting away somewhere on the grounds, but there's perfect solitude for those who want it. The courtyards and patios always have a fountain, sometimes a silent, welling pool, sometimes a series of bowls, the water cascading from basin to basin. Through the larger parks wind the many branches of a clear stream, with little falls here and there. You always hear the sound of water. Unobtrusive, comfortable seats are provided, light chairs that can be moved, some of them legless, just a frame with a canvas seat and back, so you can sit right on the short green turf but have your back supported while you read; and there are chairs and tables and chaise longues in the shade of the trees and under the arcades. All these seats are provided with outlets into which you can connect your legemat.

The climate of Mahigul is lovely, dry, and hot all summer and fall. 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. Or you can settle down under the stone arches that surround a quiet, grey courtyard and see rain patter in the lily-dotted central pool. 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 color in a milk opal. The fog softens the sloping lawns and the high, dark trees, bringing them close, into a quiet, mysterious intimacy. So when I'm in Mahigul I go there, and greet the patient, knowledgeable librarians, and browse around in the findery until I find an interesting bit of fiction or history. History, usually, because the history of Mahigul outdoes the fiction of many other places. It is a sad and violent history, but in so sweet and lenient a place as the Reading Gardens it seems both possible and wise to open one's heart to folly, pain, and sorrow. These are a few of the stories I've read sitting in the mild autumn sunlight on the grassy edge of a stream, or in the deep shade of a silent, secret little patio on a hot summer afternoon, in the Library of Mahigul.

Dawodow the Innumerable

WHEN DAWODOW, Fiftieth Emperor of the Fourth Dynasty of Mahigul, came to the throne, many statues of his grandfather Andow and his father Dowwode stood in the capital city and the lesser cities of the land. Dawodow ordered them all re-carved into his own image, so that they all became portraits of him. He also had countless new likenesses of himself carved. Thousands of workmen were employed at immense stoneyards and workshops making idealised portrait figures of the Emperor Dawodow. What with the old statues with new faces and the new statues, there were so many that there weren't pedestals and plinths enough to set them on or niches enough to set them in, so they were placed on sidewalks, at street crossings, on the steps of temples and public buildings, and in squares and plazas. As the Emperor kept paying the sculptors to carve the statues and the stoneyards kept turning them out, soon there were too many to place singly; groups and crowds of Dawo-dows now stood motionless among the people going about their business in every town and city of the kingdom. Even small villages had ten or a dozen Dawodows, standing in the high street or the side lanes, among the pigs and chickens.

At night the Emperor would often put on plain, dark clothing and leave the palace by a secret door. Officers of the palace guard followed him at a distance to protect him during these nocturnal excursions through his capital city (called, at that time, Dawodowa). They and other palace officials witnessed his behavior many times. The Emperor would go about in the streets and plazas of the capital, and stop at every image or group of images of himself. He would jeer softly at the statues, insulting them in a whisper, calling them coward, fool, cuckold, impotent, idiot. He would spit on a statue as he passed it. If he saw no one else in the plaza, he would stop and piss on the statue, or piss on earth to make mud and then, taking this mud in his hand, rub it on the face of the image of himself and over the inscription extolling the glories of his reign.

If a citizen reported next day that he had seen an image of the Emperor defiled in this way, the guards would arrest a countryman or a foreigner, anyone who came to hand—if nobody else was convenient, they arrested the citizen who had reported the crime—accuse him of sacrilege, and torture him until he died or confessed. If he confessed, the Emperor in his capacity as God's Judge would condemn him to die in the next mass Execution of Justice. These executions took place every forty days. The Emperor, his priests, and his court watched them. Since the victims were strangled one by one by garotte, the ceremony often lasted several hours. The Emperor Dawodow reigned for thirty-seven years. He was garotted in his privy by his great-nephew Danda.

During the civil wars that followed, most of the thousands of statues of Dawodow were destroyed. A group of them in front of the temple in a small city in the mountains stood for many centuries, worshiped by the local people as images of the Nine Blessed Guides to the Inworld. Constant rubbing of sweet oil on the images obliterated the faces entirely, reducing the heads to featureless lumps, but enough of the inscription remained that a scholar of the Seventh Dynasty could identify them as the last remnants of the Innumerable Dawodow.

The Cleansing of Obtry

OBTRY IS CURRENTLY a remote western province of the Empire of Mahigul. It was absorbed when Emperor Tro II annexed the nation of Ven, which had previously annexed Obtry.

The Cleansing of Obtry began about five hundred years ago, when Obtry, a democracy, elected a president whose campaign promise was to drive the Astasa out of the country.

At that time, the rich plains of Obtry had been occupied for over a millennium by two peoples: the Sosa, who had come from the northwest, and the Astasa, who had come from the southwest. The Sosa arrived as refugees, driven from their homeland by invaders, at about the same time the seminomadic Astasa began to settle down in the grazing lands of Obtry.

Displaced by these immigrants, the aboriginal inhabitants of Obtry, the Tyob, retreated to the mountains, where they lived as poor herdsfolk. The Tyob kept to their old primitive ways and language and were not allowed to vote.

The Sosa and the Astasa each brought a religion to the plains of Obtry. The Sosa prostrated themselves in worship of a fathergod called Af. The highly formal rituals of the Affa religion were held in temples and led by priests. The Astasa religion was nontheistic and unprofessional, involving trances, whirling dances, visions, and small fetishes. When they first came to Obtry the Astasa were fierce warriors, driving the Tyob up into the mountains and taking the best farmlands from the Sosa settlers; but there was plenty of good land, and the two invading peoples gradually settled down side by side. Cities were built along the rivers, some of them populated by Sosa, some by Astasa. The Sosa and Astasa traded, arid their trade increased. Sosa traders soon began to live in enclaves or ghettos in Astasa cities, and Astasa traders began to live in enclaves or ghettos in Sosa cities.

For over nine hundred years there was no central government over the region. It was a congeries of city-states and farm territories, which competed in trade with one another and from time to time quarreled or battled over land or belief, but generally maintained a watchful, thriving peace.

The Astasa opinion of the Sosa was that they were slow, dense, deceitful, and indefatigable. The Sosa opinion of the Astasa was that they were quick, clever, candid, and unpredictable.

The Sosa learned how to play the wild, whining, yearning music of the Astasa. The Astasa learned contour plowing and crop rotation from the Sosa. They seldom, however, learned each other's language—only enough to trade and bargain with, some insults, and some words of love. Sons of the Sosa arid daughters of the Astasa fell madly in love and ran off together, breaking their mothers' hearts. Astasa boys eloped with Sosa girls, the curses of their families filling the skies and darkening the streets behind them. These fugitives went to other cities, where they lived in AfFastasa enclaves and Sosasta or Astasosa ghettos, and brought up their children to prostrate themselves to Af, or to whirl in the fetish dance. The Affastasa did both, on different holy days. The Sosasta performed whirling dances to a wild whining music before the altar of Af, and the Astasosa prostrated themselves to little fetishes.

The Sosa, the unadulterated Sosa who worshiped Af in the ancestral fashion and who mostly lived on farms not in the cities, were instructed by their priests that their God wished them to bear sons in His honor; so they had large families. Many priests had four or five wives and twenty or thirty children. Devout Sosa women prayed to Father Af for a twelfth, a fifteenth baby. In contrast, an Astasa woman bore a child only when she had been told, in trance, by her own body fetish, that it was a good time to conceive; and so she seldom had more than two or three children. Thus the Sosa came to outnumber the Astasa.

About five hundred years ago, the unorganised cities, towns, and farming communities of Obtry, underpressure from the aggressive Vens to the north and under the influence of the Ydaspian Enlightenment emanating from the Mahigul Empire in the east, drew together and formed first an alliance, then a nation-state. Nations were in fashion at the time. The Nation of Obtry was established as a democracy, with a president, a cabinet, and a parliament elected by universal adult suffrage. The parliament proportionately represented the regions (rural and urban) and the ethnoreligious populations (Sosa, Astasa, AfFastasa, Sosasta, and Astasosa).

The fourth President of Obtry was a Sosa named Diud, elected by a fairly large majority.

Although his campaign had become increasingly outspoken against

"godless" and "foreign" elements of Obtrian society, many Astasa voted for him. They wanted a strong leader, they said. They wanted a man who would stand up against the Vens and restore law and order to the cities, which were suffering from overpopulation and uncontrolled mercantilism. Within half a year Diud, having put personal favorites in the key positions in the cabinet and parliament and consolidated his control of the armed forces, began his campaign in earnest. He instituted a universal census which required all citizens to state their religious allegiance (Sosa, Sosasta, Astasosa, or Heathen) and their bloodline (Sosa or non-Sosa). Diud then moved the Civic Guard of Dobaba, a predominately Sosa city in an almost purely Sosa agricultural area, to the city of Asu, a major river port, where the population had lived peacefully in Sosa, Astasa, Sosasta, and Astasosa neighborhoods for centuries. There the guards began to force all Astasa, or Heathen non-Sosa, newly reidentified as godless persons, to leave their homes, taking with them only what they could seize in the terror of sudden displacement.

The godless persons were shipped by train to the northwestern border. There they were held in various fenced camps or pens for weeks or months, before being taken to the Venian border. They were dumped from trucks or train cars and ordered to cross the border. At their backs were soldiers with guns. They obeyed. But there were also soldiers facing them: Ven border guards. The first time this happened, the Ven soldiers, thinking they were facing an Obtrian invasion, shot hundreds of people before they realised that most of the invaders were children or babies or old or pregnant, that none of them were armed, that all of them were cowering, crawling, trying to run away, crying for mercy. Some of the Ven soldiers continued shooting anyway, on the principle that Obtrians were the enemy.

President Diud continued his campaign of rounding up all the godless persons, city by city. Most were taken to remote regions and kept herded in fenced areas called instructional centers, where they were supposed to be instructed in the worship of Af. Little shelter and less food was provided in the instructional centers. Most of the inmates died within a year. Many Astasa fled before the roundups, heading for the border and risking the random mercy of the Vens. By the end of his first term of office, President Diud had cleansed his nation of half a million Astasa. He ran for reelection on the strength of his record. No Astasa candidate dared run. Diud was narrowly defeated by the new favorite of the rural, religious Sosa voters, Riusuk. Riusuk's campaign slogan was "Obtry for God," and his particular target was the Sosasta communities in the southern cities and towns, whose dancing worship his followers held to be particularly evil and sacrilegious.

A good many soldiers in the southern province, however, were Sosasta, and in Riusuk's first year of office they mutinied. They were joined by guerrilla and partisan Astasa groups hiding out in the forests and inner cities. Unrest and violence spread and factions multiplied. President Riusuk was kidnapped from his lakeside summer house. After a week his mutilated body was found beside a highway. Astasa fetishes had been stuffed into his mouth, ears, and nostrils.

During the turmoil that ensued, an Astasosa general, Hodus, naming himself acting president, took control of a large splinter group of the army and instituted a Final Cleansing of Godless Atheist Heathens, the term which now defined Astasa, Sosasta, and Affastasa. His soldiers killed anybody who was or was thought to be or was said to be non-Sosa, shooting them wherever they were found and leaving the bodies to rot. Affastasa from the northwestern province took arms under an able leader, Shamato, who had been a schoolteacher; her partisans, fiercely loyal, held four northern cities and the mountain regions against Hodus's forces for seven years. Shamato was killed on a raid into Astasosa territory.

Hodus closed the universities as soon as he took power. He installed Affan priests as teachers in the schools, but later in the civil war all schools shut down, as they were favorite targets for sharpshooters and bombers. There were no safe trade routes, the borders were closed, commerce ceased, famine followed, and epidemics followed famine. Sosa and non-Sosa continued killing one another.

The Vens invaded the northern province in the sixth year of the civil war. They met almost no resistance, as all able-bodied men and women were dead or fighting their neighbors. The Ven army swept through Obtry cleaning out pockets of resistance. The region was annexed to the Nation of Ven, and remained a tributary province for the next several centuries. The Vens, contemptuous of all Obtrian religions, enforced public worship of their deity, the Great Mother of the Teats. The Sosa, Astasosa, and Sosasta learned to prostrate themselves before huge mammary effigies, and the few remaining Astasa and Affastasa learned to dance in a circle about small tit fetishes.

Only the Tyob, far up in the mountains, remained much as they had always been, poor herdsfolk, with no religion worth fighting over. The anonymous author of the great mystical poem The Ascent, a work which has made the province of Obtry famous on more than one plane, was a Tyob.

The Black Dog

TWO TRIBES OF THE great Yeye Forest were traditional enemies. As a boy of the Hoa or the Farim grew up, he could scarcely wait for the honor of being chosen to go on a raid—the seal and recognition of his manhood. Most raids were met by an opposing war party from the other tribe, and the battles were fought on various traditional battlegrounds, clearings in the forested hills and river valleys where the Hoa and Farim lived. After hard fighting, when six or seven men had been wounded or killed, the war chiefs on both sides would simultaneously declare a victory. The warriors of each tribe would run home, carrying their dead and wounded, to hold a victory dance. The dead warriors were propped up to watch the dance before they were buried.

Occasionally, by some mistake in communications, no war party came forth to meet the raiders, who were then obliged to run on into the enemy's village and kill men and carry off women and children for slaves. This was unpleasant work and often resulted in the death of women, children, and old people of the village as well as the loss of many of the raiding party. It was considered much more satisfactory all around if the raidees knew that the raiders were coming, so that the fighting and killing could be done properly on a battlefield and did not get out of hand. The Hoa and Farim had no domestic animals except small terrier-like dogs to keep the huts and granaries free of mice. Their weapons were short bronze swords and long wooden lances, and they carried hide shields. Like Odysseus, they used bow and arrow for sport and for hunting but not in battle. They planted grain and root vegetables in clearings, and moved the village to new planting grounds every five or six years. Women and girls did all the farming, gathering, food preparation, house moving, and other work, which was not called work but "what women do." The women also did the fishing. Boys snared wood rats and coneys, men hunted the small roan deer of the forest, and old men decided when it was time to plant, when it was time to move the village, and when it was time to send a raid against the enemy.

So many young men were killed in raids that there were not many old men to argue about these matters, and if they did get into an argument about planting or moving, they could always agree to order another raid. Since the beginning of time things had gone along in this fashion, with raids once or twice a year, both sides celebrating victory. Word of a raid was usually leaked well in advance, and the raiding party sang war songs very loudly as they came; so the battles were fought on the battlefields, the villages were unharmed, and the villagers had only to mourn their fallen heroes and declare their undying hatred of the vile Hoa, or the vile Farim. It was all satisfactory, until the Black Dog appeared. The Farim got word that Hoa was sending out a large war party. All the Farim warriors stripped naked, seized their swords, lances, and shields, and singing war songs loudly, rushed down the forest trail to the battlefield known as By Bird Creek. There they met the men of the Hoa just running into the clearing, naked, armed with lance, sword, and shield, singing war songs loudly.

But in front of the Hoa came a strange thing: a huge black dog. Its back was as high as a man's waist, and its head was massive. It ran in leaps and bounds, its eyes gleamed red, foam slathered from its gaping, long-toothed jaws, and it growled hideously. It attacked the war chief of the Farim, jumping straight at his chest. It knocked him down, and even as he tried vainly to stab it with his sword, the dog tore open his throat. This utterly unexpected, untraditional, horrible event bewildered and terrified the Farim, paralysed them. Their war song died away. They barely resisted the assault of the Hoa. Four more Farim men and boys were killed—one of them by the Black Dog—before they fled in panic, scattering through the forest, not stopping to pick up their dead. Such a thing had never happened before. The old men of the Farim therefore had to discuss the matter very deeply before they ordered a retaliatory raid. Since raids were always victorious, usually months went by, sometimes even a year, before another battle was needed to keep the young men in heroic fettle; but this was different. The Farim had been defeated. Their warriors had had to creep back to the battleground at night, in fear and trembling, to pick up their dead; and they found the bodies defiled by the dog—one man's ear had been chewed off, and the war chief's left arm had been eaten, its bones lying about, tooth-marked.

The need of the warriors of the Farim to win a victory was urgent. For three days and nights the old men sang war songs. Then the young men stripped, took up their swords, lances, shields, and ran, grim-faced and singing loudly, down the forest path towards the village of the Hoa. But even before they got to the first battlefield on that path, bounding towards them on the narrow trail under the trees came the terrible Black Dog. Following it came the warriors of the Hoa, singing loudly. The warriors of the Farim turned around and ran away without fighting, scattering through the forest.

One by one they straggled into their village, late in the evening. The women did not greet them but set out food for them silently. Their children turned away from them and hid from them in the huts. The old men also stayed in the huts, crying. The warriors lay down, each alone on his sleeping mat, and they too cried.

The women talked in the starlight by the drying racks. "We will all be made slaves," they said. "Slaves of the vile Hoa. Our children will be slaves."

No raid, however, came from the Hoa, the next day, or the next. The waiting was very difficult. Old men and young men talked together. They decided that they must raid the Hoa and kill the Black Dog even if they died in the attempt.

They sang the war songs all night long. In the morning, very grim-faced and not singing, they set out, all the warriors of Farim, on the straightest trail to Hoa. They did not run. They walked, steadily. They looked and looked ahead, down the trail, for the Black Dog to appear, with its red eyes and slathering jaws and gleaming teeth. In dread they looked for it.

And it appeared. But it was not leaping and bounding at them, snarling and growling. It ran out from the trees into the path and stopped a moment looking back at them, silent, with what seemed a grin on its terrible mouth. Then it set off trotting ahead of them.

"It is running from us," cried Ahu. "It is leading us," said Yu, the war chief. "Leading us to death," said young Gim. "To victory!" Yu cried, and began to run, holding his spear aloft.

They were at the Hoa village before the Hoa men realised it was a raid and ran out to meet them, clothed, unready, unarmed. The Black Dog leapt at the first Hoa man, knocked him onto his back, and began tearing at his face and throat. Children and women of the village screamed, some ran away, some seized sticks and tried to attack the attackers, all was confusion, but all of them fled when the Black Dog left his victim and charged at the villagers. The warriors of the Farim followed the Black Dog into the village. There they killed several men and seized two women all in a moment. Then Yu shouted, "Victory!" and all his warriors shouted,

"Victory!" and they turned and set off back to Farim, carrying their captives, but not their dead, for they had not lost a man. The last warrior in line looked back down the trail. The Black Dog was following them. Its mouth dropped white saliva. At Farim they held a victory dance; but it was not a satisfactory victory dance. There were no dead warriors propped up, bloody sword in cold hand, to watch and approve the dancers. The two slaves they had taken sat with their heads bowed and their hands over their eyes, crying. Only the Black Dog watched them, sitting under the trees, grinning. All the little rat dogs of the village hid under the huts. "Soon we will raid Hoa again!" shouted young Gim.

"We will follow the Spirit Dog to victory!"

"You will follow me," said the war chief, Yu. "You will follow our advice," said the oldest man, Imfa. The women kept the mead jars filled so the men could get drunk, but stayed away from the victory dance, as always. They met together and talked in the starlight by the drying racks. When the men were all lying around drunk, the two Hoa women who had been captured tried to creep away in the darkness; but the Black Dog stood before them, baring its teeth and growling. They turned back, frightened.

Some of the village women came from the drying racks to meet them, and they began to talk together. The women of the Farim and the Hoa speak the women's language, which is the same in both tribes, though the men's language is not.

"Where did this kind of dog come from?" asked Imfa's Wife.

"We do not know," the older Hoa woman said. "When our men went out to raid, it appeared running before them, and attacked your warriors. And a second time it did that. So the old men in our village have been feeding it with venison and live coneys and rat dogs, calling it the Victory Spirit. Today it turned on us and gave your men the victory."

"We too can feed the dog," said Imfa's Wife. And the women discussed this for a while.

Yu's Aunt went back to the drying racks and took from them a whole shoulder of dried smoked venison. Imfa's Wife smeared some paste on the meat. Then Yu's Aunt carried it towards the Black Dog. "Here, doggy," she said. She dropped it on the ground. The Black Dog came forward snarling, snatched the piece of meat, and began tearing at it.

"Good doggy," said Yu's Aunt.

Then all the women went to their huts. Yu's Aunt took the captives into her hut and gave them sleeping mats and coverlets.

In the morning the warriors of Farim awoke with aching heads and bodies. They saw and heard the children of Farim, all in a group, chattering like little birds. What were they looking at?

The body of the Black Dog, stiff and stark, pierced through and through with a hundred fishing spears.

"The women have done this thing," said the warriors.

"With poisoned meat and fishing spears," said Yu's Aunt.