"We did not advise you to do this thing," said the old men.

"Nevertheless," said Imfa's Wife, "it is done." Ever thereafter the Farim raided the Hoa and the Hoa raided the Farim at reasonable intervals, and they fought to the death on the traditional and customary battlefields and came home victorious with their dead, who watched the warriors dance the victory dance, and were satisfied. 

The War across the Alon

IN ANCIENT DAYS in Mahigul, two city-states, Meyun and Huy, were rivals in commerce and learning and the arts, and also quarreled continually over the border between their pasturelands. The myth of the founding of Meyun went thus: the goddess Tarv, having spent a particularly pleasant night with a young mortal, a cowherd named Mey, gave him her blue starry mantle. She told him that when he spread it out, all the ground it covered would be the site of a great city, of which he would be lord. It seemed to Mey that his city would be rather a small one, maybe five feet long and three feet wide; but he picked a nice bit of his father's pastureland and spread the goddess's mantle on the grass. And behold, the mande spread and spread, and the more he unfolded it the more there was to unfold, until it covered all the hilly land between two streams, the little Unon and the larger Alon. Once he got the border marked, the starry mantle ascended to its owner. An enterprising cowherd, Mey got a city going and ruled it long and well; and after his death it went on thriving.

As for Huy, its myth was this: a maiden named Hu slept out in her father's plow lands one warm summer night. The god Bult looked down, saw her, and more or less automatically ravished her. Hu was enraged. She did not accept his droit du seigneur. She announced she was going to go tell his wife. To placate her the god told her she would bear him a hundred sons, who would found a great city on the very spot where she had lost her virginity. On finding that she was more pregnant than seemed possible, Hu was angrier than ever and went straight to Bull's wife, the goddess Tarv. Tarv could not undo what Bult had done, but she could alter things a bit. In due time Hu bore a hundred daughters. They became enterprising young women, who founded a city on their maternal grandfather's farm and ruled it long and well; and after they died, it went on thriving.

Unfortunately, part of the western boundary line of Hu's father's farm ran in a curve that crossed the stream to which the eastern edge of Tarv's starry cloak had reached.

After a generation of disputing about who owned this crescent of land, which at its widest reached about a half mile west of the stream, the descendants of Mey and Hu took their claims to their source, the goddess Tarv and her husband Bult. But the divine couple could not agree on a settlement, or indeed on ; anything else.

Bult backed the Huyans and would hear no arguments. He had told Hu her descendants would own the land and rule the city, and that was that, even if they had all turned out girls.

Tarv, who had some sense of fair play but did not feel any great warmth towards the swarming progeny of her husband's hundred bastard daughters, said that she'd lent Mey her mande before Bult raped Hu, so Mey had prior claim to die land, and that was that.

Bult consulted some of his granddaughters, who pointed out that that piece of land west of the river had been part of Hu's father's family farm for at least a century before Tarv lent her mantle to Mey. No doubt, said the granddaughters, the slight extension of the mantle onto Hu's father's land had been a mere oversight, which the City of Huy would be willing to overlook, provided the City of Meyun paid a small reparation of sixty bullocks and ten thubes of gold. One of the thubes of gold would be pounded into gold leaf to cover the altar of the Temple of Mighty Bult in the City of Huy. And that would be the end of it.

Tarv consulted no one. She said that when she said the city's land would be all that her mantle covered, she meant exactly that, no more, no less. If the people of Meyun wanted to coat the altar of Starry Tarv in their city with gold leaf (which they had already done), that was fine, but it had no effect on her decision, which was based on unalterable fact and inspired by divine justice.

It was at this point that the two cities took up arms; and from this time on Bult and Tarv played no recorded role in events, however constantly and fervently invoked by their descendants and devotees in Meyun and Huy.

For the next couple of generations the dispute simmered, sometimes breaking out in armed forays from Huy across the stream to the land they claimed on its western bank. About a mile and a half of the length of the stream was in dispute. The Alón was some thirty yards wide at its shallowest, narrower where it ran between banks five feet high. There were some good trout pools in the northern end of the disputed reach. The forays from Huy always met fierce resistance from Meyun. Whenever the Huyans succeeded in keeping the piece of land west of the Alón, they put up a wall around it in a semicircle out from the stream and back. The men of Meyun would then gather their forces, lead a foray against the wall, drive the Huyans back across the Alón, pull the Huyans' wall down, and erect a wall running along the east side of the stream for a mile and a half. But that was the part of the stream to which the Huyan herders were accustomed to drive their cattle to drink. They would immediately begin pulling down the Meyunian wall. Archers of Meyun shot at them, hitting sometimes a man, sometimes a cow. The rage of Huy boiled over, and another foray burst forth from the gates of the city and retook the land west of the Alón. Peacemakers intervened. The Council of the Fathers of Meyun met in conclave, the Council of the Mothers of Huy met in conclave, they ordered the combatants to withdraw, sent messengers and diplomats back and forth across the Alón, tried to reach a settlement, and failed. Or sometimes they succeeded, but then a cowherd of Huy would take his cattle across the stream into the rich pastures where since time immemorial they had grazed, and cowherds of Meyun would round up the trespassing herds and drive them to the walled paddocks of their city, and the cowherd of Huy would rush home vowing to bring down the wrath of B

ult upon the thieves and get his cattle back. Or two fishermen fishing the quiet pools of the Alón above the cattle crossing would quarrel over whose pools they were fishing, and stride back to their respective cities vowing to keep poachers out of their waters. And it would all start up again. Not a great many were killed in these forays, but still they caused a fairly steady mortality among the young men of both cities. At last the Councilwomen of Huy decided that this running sore must be healed once for all, and without bloodshed. As so often, invention was the mother of discovery. Copper miners of Huy had recently developed a powerful explosive. The Councilwomen saw in it the means to end the war. They ordered out a large workforce. Guarded by archers and spearmen, these Huyans, by furious digging and the planting of explosive charges in the ground, in the course of twenty-six hours changed the course of the Alon for the whole disputed mile and half. With their explosives they dammed the stream and dug a channel that led it to run in an arc along the border they claimed, west of its old course. This new course followed the line of ruins of the various walls they had built and Meyun had torn down.

They then sent messengers across the meadows to Meyun to announce, in polite and ceremonious terms, that peace between the cities was restored, since the boundary Meyun had always claimed—the east bank of the river Alon—was acceptable to Huy, so long as the cattle of Huy were allowed to drink at certain watering places on the eastern bank. A good part of the Council of Meyun was willing to accept this solution. They admitted that the wily women of Huy were bilking them out of their property; but it was only a bit of pas-tureland not two miles long and less than a half mile wide; and their fishing rights to the pools of the Alon were no longer to be in question. They urged acceptance of the new course of the river. But sterner minds refused to yield to chicanery. The Lactor General made a speech in which he cried that every inch of that precious soil was drenched in the red blood of the sons of Mey and made sacred by the starry cloak of Tarv. That speech turned the vote. Meyun had not yet invented very effective explosives, but it is easier to restore a stream to its natural course than to induce it to follow an artificial one. A wildly enthusiastic workforce of citizens, digging furiously, guarded by archers and spearmen, returned the Alón to its bed in the course of a single night.

There was no resistance, no bloodshed, for the Council of Huy, bent on peace, had forbidden their guards to attack the party from Meyun. Standing on the east bank of the Alon, having met no opposition, smelling victory in the air, the Lactor General cried, "Forward, men! Crush the conniving strumpets once and for all!" And with one cry, says the annalist, all the archers and spearmen of Meyun, followed by many of the citi-zens who had come to help move the river back to its bed, rushed across the half mile of meadow to the walls of Huy.

They broke into the city, but the city guards were ready for them, as were the citizens, who fought like tigers to defend their homes. When, after an hour's bloody fighting, the Lactor General was slain—felled by a forty-pint butter churn shoved out a window onto his head by an enraged housewife—the forces of Meyun retreated in disorder back to the Alón. They regrouped and defended the stream bravely until nightfall, when they were driven back across it and took refuge within their own city walls. The guards and citizens of Huy did not try to enter Meyun, but went back and planted explosives and dug all night to restore the Alón to its new, west-curving course.

Given the highly infectious nature of technologies of destruction, it was inevitable that Meyun should discover how to make explosives as powerful as those of their rival. What was perhaps unusual was that neither city chose to use them as a weapon. As soon as Meyun had the explosives, their army, led by a man in the newly created rank of Sapper General, marched out and blew up the dam across the old bed of the Alón. The river rushed into its former course, and the army marched back to Meyun. Under their new Supreme Engineer, appointed by the disappointed and vindictive Councilwomen of Huy, the guards marched out and did some sophisticated dynamiting which, by blocking the old course and deepening the access to the new course of the river, led the Alón to flow happily back into the latter.

Henceforth the territorialism of the two city-states was expressed almost entirely in explosions. Though many soldiers and citizens and a great many cows were killed, as technological improvements led to ever more powerful agents of destruction which could blow up ever larger quantities of earth, these charges were never planted as mines with the intention of killing. Their sole purpose was to fulfill the great aim of Meyun and Huy: to change the course of the river.

For nearly a hundred years the two city-states devoted the greatest part of their energies and resources to this purpose.

By the end of the century, the landscape of the region had been enormously and irrevocably altered. Once green meadows had sloped gently down to the willow-clad banks of the little Alón with its clear trout pools, its rocky narrows, its muddy watering places and cattle crossings where cows stood dreaming udder-deep in the cool shallows. In place of this there was now a canyon, a vast chasm, half a mile across from lip to lip and nearly two thousand feet deep. Its overhanging walls were of raw earth and shattered rock. Nothing could grow on them; even when not destabilised by repeated explosions, they eroded in the winter rains, slipping down continually in rockfalls and landslides that blocked the course of the brown, silt-choked torrent at the bottom, forcing it to undercut the walls on the other side, causing more slides and erosion, which kept widening and lengthening the canyon.

Both the cities of Meyun and Huy now stood only a few hundred yards from the edge of a precipice. They hurled defiance at each other across the abyss which had eaten up their pastures, their fields, their cattle, and all their thubes of gold.

As the river and all the disputed land was now down at the bottom of this huge desolation of mud and rock, there was nothing to be gained by blowing it up again; but habit is powerful.

The war did not end until the dreadful night when in a sudden, monstrous moment, half the city of Meyun shivered, tilted, and slid bodily into the Grand Canyon of the Alón.

The charges which destabilised the east wall of the canyon had been set, not by the Supreme Engineer of Huy, but by the Sapper General of Meyun. To the ravaged and terrified people of Meyun, the disaster was still not their fault, but Huy's fault: it was because Huy existed that the Sapper General had set his misplaced charges. But many citizens of Huy came hurrying across the Alón, crossing it miles to the north or south where the canyon was shallower, to help the survivors of the enormous mudslide which had swallowed half Meyun's houses and inhabitants. Their honest generosity was not without effect. A truce was declared. It held, and was made into a peace.

Since then the rivalry between Meyun and Huy has been intense but nonexplosive. Having no more cows or pastures, they live off tourists. Perched on the very brink of the West Rim of the Grand Canyon, what is left of Meyun has the advantage of a dramatic and picturesque site, which attracts thousands of visitors every year. But most of the visitors actually stay in Huy, where the food is better, and which is only a very short stroll from the East Rim with its marvelous views of the canyon and the half-buried ruins of Old Meyun.

Each city maintains on its respective side a winding path for tourists riding donkeys to descend among the crags and strange, towering mud formations of the canyon to the little River Alón that flows, clear again, though cowless and trout-less, in the depths. There the tourists have a picnic on the grassy banks. The guides from Huy tell their tourists the amusing legend of the Hundred Daughters of Bult, and the guides from Meyun tell their tourists the entertaining myth of the Starry Cloak of Tarv. Then they all ride their donkeys slowly back up to the light. 

GREAT JOY

I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT there is a restricted plane. It came as a shock. I'd taken it for granted that once you got the hang of Sita Dulip's Method, you could go from any airport to any plane, and that the options were essentially infinite. The frequent updates to the Encyclopedia Planaria are evidence that the number of known planes keeps increasing. And I thought all of them were accessible (under the right conditions) from all the others, until my cousin Sulie told me about The Holiday Plane.™

This plane can be reached only from certain airports, all of them in the United States, most of them in Texas. At Dallas and Houston there are Holiday Plane Club Lounges for tour groups to this special destination. How they induce the necessary stress and indigestion in these lounges, I do not really want to know.

Nor do I have any wish to visit the plane; but Cousin Sulie has been going there for several years. She was on the way there when she told me about it, and in response to my request she kindly brought me back a whole tote bag full of flyers, brochures, and promotional materials, from which I compiled this description. There is a Web site, though its address seems to change without notice.

Any history of the place has to be mere guesswork. Going by the dates on the brochures, it is not more than ten years old. I imagine a scenario of its origin: a bunch of businessmen are delayed at a Texas airport, and get to talking in that bar where first-class and business-class persons can go but other persons cannot. One of the businessmen suggests they all try out Sita Dulip's Method. Through inexperience or bravado they find themselves not on one of the popular tourist planes but on one not even listed in Roman's Handy Guide. And they find it, in their view, virgin: unexplored, undeveloped, a Third World plane just waiting for the wizardry of the entrepreneur, the magic touch of exploitation. I imagine that the native population was spread out over many small islands and that they were very poor, or fatally hospitable, or both. Evidently they were ready and willing, through innocent hope of gain or love of novelty, to adopt a new way of life. At any rate, ready or not, they learned to do what they were told to do and behave the way they were taught to behave by the Great Joy Corporation.

Great Joy has a kind of Chinese sound to it, but all the promotional literature Cousin Sulie brought me was printed in the United States. The Great Joy Corporation owns the trade-marked name of the plane and issues the PR. Beyond that, I know nothing about Great Joy. I have not tried to investigate it.

It's no use. There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation. Even after they collapse, imploding into a cratered ruin stinking of burnt stockholder and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier formed by members of Congress and other government officials holding hands and wearing yellow tape marked Private Property, No Trespassing, Keep Out, No Hunting, Fishing, or Accounting—even then there is no truth in them.

Insofar as one can trust the promotional copy, the world of Great Joy is mostly a warm, shallow ocean dotted with small islands. They look flatter than our volcanic Pacific islands, more like big sandbars. The climate is said to be warm and pleasant. There must be, or must have been, native plants and animals, but there is nothing about them in the advertising. The only trees in the photographs are firs and coconut palms in large pots. There is nothing about the people, either, unless you count references to

"the friendly, colorful natives."

The largest island, or anyhow the one with by far the most elaborate advertising copy, is Christmas Island.

That is where Cousin Sulie goes every time she gets the chance. Since she lives in rural South Carolina and has a daughter in San Diego and a son in Minneapolis, she gets the chance fairly often, so long as she makes sure to change planes at the right places: the major Texas airports, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Her son and daughter expect her to visit them sometime in August, because that's when she likes to do her Christmas shopping, and again perhaps in early December, when she panics about things she didn't buy in August.

"I just get right into the spirit just thinking about Christmas Island!" she says. "Oh, it is just such a happy place! And the prices are really just as low as Wal-Mart, and a much better selection." Mild and sunny as the climate is said to be, all the windows of the shops and stores in No¸l City, Yuleville, and O Little Town are rimed with frost, the sills heaped with eternal snow, the frames garlanded with fir and holly. Bells ring continuous peals from dozens of spires and steeples. Cousin Sulie says there are no churches under the steeples, only retail space, but the steeples are very picturesque. All the retail spaces and the crowded streets are full of the sound of carols wafting endlessly over the heads of the Christmas shoppers and the natives. The natives in the photographs are dressed in approximately Victorian costume, the men with tailcoats and top hats, the women with crinolines. The boys carry hoops, the girls rag dolls. The natives fill up the spaces in the streets, hurrying merrily about, making sure there are no empty blocks or unbustling squares. They drive sightseers about in horse-drawn carriages and char-a-bancs, sell bunches of mistletoe, and sweep crossings. Cousin Sulie says they always speak to you so nicely. I asked what they said. They say, "Merry Christmas!" or "A fine evening to you!" or "Gahbressa sebberwun!" She was not sure what this last phrase meant, but when she repeated it as she had heard it, I identified it, I think.

It is Christmas Eve all year long on Christmas Island, and all the shops and stores of Noel City and Yuleville, 220 of them according to the brochure, are open 24/7/365.

"Those little tacky Christmas-All-Year-Round-type shops like we have at home," Sulie says, "they're just nowhere. I mean to tell you. Why, there's one store in Noel City that is entirely bags. You know, pretty paper bags?

or foil or cellophane? for gifts you haven't got the time to wrap, or they're kind of knobbly? So you just pop them in a bag with some ofthat curly foamy-like paper ribbon spilling out, and it is as pretty as it could be and just as good next year, too, if you fold it nice." When she has done her shopping and visited the Angels Nook, a sort of chapel where tea is served in the Little Drummer Boy Inn where she stays—the Adeste Fideles Inn, she says, is very nice but just too expensive—Sulie treats herself with a trip to O Little Town. She says O

Little Town is "her favorite place in the world." If she has time, she goes there by one-horse sleigh, over the Christmas Tree Mile, a road lined with decorated fir trees in large pots and kept covered with artificial snow, the natural variety not being available. Cousin Sulie is vague about the landscape beyond the fir trees. "Oh just sandy, like pine barrens, I guess," she says, "only no pines. But you should hear those bells just jingling! And do you know that horse always has a bobtail? Just like in the song?"

If her time is limited, she goes from Noel City to O Little Town on the Xmas Xpress, a jet trolley. In O Little Town one must walk, or if unable or disinclined to walk, one may ride the open-sided Santa Trains, operated by elves, which circulate constantly among all the points of interest.

"You can't get lost," says Cousin Sulie, "and you know, it's so safe. Just think of the difference from all that ugliness in the Holy Land? Feeling safe just makes such a difference."

There are churches as well as steeples in O Little Town; they are replicas of famous sites in Jerusalem, Rome, Guadalupe, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City. Villagers dressed in what my cousin calls "sort of Bible clothes" keep stalls in a lively marketplace selling peppermint canes and ribbon candy, toys, craft items, and souvenirs; children tumble in the dooryards of little cottages; now and then a shepherd drives a small flock of sheep down the street. Just outside the village is what the brochures describe in vibrant and reverential language as the high point of every visit: the Manger. Cousin Sulie gets a little teary when she talks about it. "It seems like outside, because you go into like a big tent. Like a circus, you know? but more like a what do you call them? A planetarium? A planetarium. With black night sky, and stars overhead? Even when it's a sunny day outside. It's the night and the stars, there. And the Star, the Christmas Star. Just blazing there right over that poor humble little manger. Oh, it just puts our First Baptist lawn scene to shame. I am here to tell you. It is so beautiful. And the animals. Not just a sheep or two, butflocks of sheep, and cows, and donkeys, and the camels, and they're real. And the people are real! Alive. And that adorable baby! Oh, I know they must just be actors and do it for a living, but I do feel they must be blessed by it even if they don't know it. I spoke to one of the Josephs once, I recognised him in the yard of one of those sweet little cottages in the village. I'd seen him being Joseph more than once, a fine-looking man, about fifty, he has a nice face, and you know somehow Joseph isn't so awesome as the others?

The Kings, now, I'd never. And that little Mary is just too angelic for this world. But Joseph seems like more approachable. So I greeted him, and he smiled and waved his hands like foreigners do and said Merra-Krissma!

the way they do. They're just all so sweet. They truly show the Christmas spirit."

Sulie told me that she feels it a great pity sick children cannot be taken to Christmas Island. "Poor little mites who just can't wait those months till Santa comes—if they could only see Santa's Ride in Yuleville! It's every evening at nine and again at eleven. Those reindeer come a-clattering over die rooftop of the Cozy Home, you can see it from the Town Square or on the closed-circuit TV, and Santa gets out of the sleigh and just pops down that chimney like a jack-in-the-box backward—wouldn't they love to see that? And Rudolph's nose just glowing like a taillight! But it seems like there's no way they can figure out how to bring the children there without causing them too much distress. Even though the tour has scientifically perfected the transition for adults. You know, I wouldn't go to just any of those planes. Heaven only knows where you might end up! Christmas Island is a guaranteed destination. But it is a pity. You can't just take a poor little sick child to suffer and worry in a busy airport even though it would be such a treat for them." And tenderhearted Sulie sighs. "I don't deserve it," she says. "Sometimes, you know, I think I won't go back there again? I shouldn't. It's greedy. I should just wait for Christmas to come to me. But it's so long between Decembers..."

THERE ARE OTHER holiday isles on the Great Joy Corporation plane. Cousin Sulie has visited only Easter Island. She didn't like it much, perhaps because she had a cold coming on and was worried about her flight out of Denver to Seattle. She had, rather riskily, changed planes while actually sitting in the plane while it was sitting on the ground being de-iced for the third time in a snowstorm. "It just wasn't a very good time to travel," she said.

The cover of the brochure shows a sand dune crowned with a row of the familiar frowning monoliths of the South Sea Easter Island. My cousin seems to have missed these or ignored them. "I guess I was looking for something a little more on the sacred side?" she said. "I did enjoy the display of those Russian Emperors' eggs. The rubies and gold and all. They were pretty. But you wonder why emperors need so many eggs. They kept them on their feet, I read somewhere. It seems strange. I suppose they were Communists. But the rabbits? Sakes! Rabbits just everywhere. Underfoot. I never much liked rabbits since James tried raising rabbits to sell to butcher markets, down in Augusta, Fred Ingley talked him into it, but there wasn't hardly any market for them, and then James got his tumor, and the rabbits took some rabbit disease and died all in a week, just died like flies, every last one of them, and I had no way to get rid of all that miserable mess but set fire to those hutch things and burn them to the ground. Oh, my. I don't like to recall that... Well, then. There's lots of little chickies peeping around, they're sweet. And the baskets in the Bunny Hop Market are just gorgeous. But I couldn't afford anything much. And it was hot! I kept thinking about that blizzard in Denver. I just wasn't in the right mood, I guess. So many eggs and rabbits."

TO JUDGE BY THE promotional materials, Christmas, Easter, and Fourth are the biggest, most developed, and most popular islands. The rather modest brochure for Hollo-Een! is all about Family Fun and clearly aimed at parents and children trapped in airports.

To judge by the photographs, Hollo-Een! Island swarms with pumpkins, I can't tell whether honest pumpkins or plastic ones. There is a fairground with roller coaster, spook rides, tunnel of horrors, etc. The natives running concessions, waiting tables, cleaning rooms, etc., are dressed as witches, ghosts, space aliens, and Ronald Reagan. There is "Trick or Treating Every Evening! Safe! Supervised! (All candy guaranteed safe and healthful)." While the children are being led about from house to house of Spook-E-Ville, the parents can watch any one of "One Hundred Horror Movies" on the big-screen TV in their suite in Addams House or Frankenstein's Castle.

I detected a slightly stuffy note in Cousin Sulie's voice when she gave me the brochure. Its text contains an inordinate number of blandly but insistently reassuring statements from Protestant ministers of various denominations. They all describe Hollo-Een! as clean, safe, wholesome family fun. Absolutely nothing "harmful" or "disturbing." But I am sure the keen noses of true believers sniff that brochure for brimstone, and their keen eyes discern, on those alien sands, the print of the cloven foot. The promotional material for Fourth Island is far more lavish and not at all defensive. From the Permanent Living Reen-actment of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima to the Rockets' Red Glare Four-Hour Fireworks Display every night, from the

United We Stand Steak House by way of the statue-lined Avenue of the Presidents to the Under God Indivisible Prayer Chapel, it is all on a grand scale, and every last piece of it is red, white, blue, striped, and starred. The Great Joy Corporation is evidently expecting or receiving patriotic visitors in great numbers. Interactive displays of the Museum of Our Heroes, the Gun Show, and the All-American Victory Gardens (salvia, lobelia, candytuft) feature large on the Web site, where one can also at all times recite the Pledge of Allegiance interactively with a chorus of five thousand virtual schoolchildren.

Accommodations on Fourth Island range from The ** George Washington Country Inn to The ****** George W Bush Grand Luxury Hotel and Suites. (It was foolish of me to hope for a grim motel with hourly rates called The Last Resort of Scoundrels.)

In comparison to the high-rises over white sand beaches, blue sea, red umbrellas, the imposing avenues, and the marble vistas of Fourth Island, Valentine's Island looks cozy and old-fashioned. It is of course heart-shaped, and Truelove Town is heart-shaped too. Lots of pink and white, lots of lace, lots of honeymoon suites, and second honeymoon suites, and eternal honeymoon suites, at the Chocolate Box Hotel. Bicycles built for two may be rented. Smiling native children dressed— barely—as cupids are photographed aiming paper arrows at smiling couples in bowers of artificial roses. "Well, I suppose if you were in the right mood, with the right person, it might be nice," says Cousin Sulie, turning over the leaflets a little disdainfully.

The brochure for New Year's Island says "all facilities brand-new." There appears to be in fact only one facility: a vast hotel. It has fourteen banquet rooms and six grand ballrooms and a golf course on the roof. The only picture taken out of doors is a view of a great open courtyard strung with Chinese lanterns. New Year's Island is evidently designed for brief visits, a few hours or a single night, by travelers who have not much time to spend and want to spend it at a party, for aside from the golf course that is all the entertainment offered—"The Party of Your Life!" Actually a wide choice of parties: one in a gilded ballroom, with balloons and waltzes and an orchestra; one in a "Green-which Village Flapper Days Loft," with jazz and bootleg gin; one in a "Cheers-Type Bar," one at a "Sixties Hippie Love-In," and so on. An appropriate costume for the evening, from ball gown or black tie to purple mohawk wig and temporary nose and lip studs, may be rented. Studying the faces in the photographs of parties in progress, I'd guess that an appropriate companion for the evening may also be rented. Among the dancers, at the buffet tables, clinking champagne glasses, are a lot of pretty, young women and handsome, fortyish men. They are all slender, all dark, and all smiling. They don't look like tourists. The tourists do. I got the impression from these brochures that a visit to the Great Joy Corporation's plane might be quite expensive, though no prices are listed. If you call the 800 number or try to find out on the Net, they just assure you that transportation to the plane is "absolutely free," and suggest brightly that you'll want to bring a "valid credit card." Cousin Sulie tells me that "it isn't half as bad as that place with the funny name in Florida that Sally Ann insisted on us going to. Honey, those people, they'll skin you."

On New Year's Island just before midnight (which I believe occurs every twelve hours, possibly every six) everybody who can still stand up flocks out to the great courtyard, where a three-story-tall TV screen shows the ball falling down in Times Square. Everybody holds hands and champagne glasses with the usual difficulty and sings "Auld Lang Syne." There are fireworks and more champagne, and the party goes on. And on, and on. I wonder how they clean the party rooms. Maybe they have duplicate rooms, one in use and one being cleaned. Maybe nobody notices. I wonder how they get drunks back to their airport of origin on time, and if they don't, do they get sued? Not that it's any use suing a corporation. I wonder what they give people to smoke at the Hippie Love-In Party and to use at the Punk Underground Party, and how they get them back where they started.

Anyhow, where it's always New Year's Eve it's never New Year's Day. No resolutions need be made. There's no need even to send the partygoers home so long as they're willing to carry on partying until the countdown begins again and the ball falls down in Times Square again and the fireworks go off again and they sing "Auld Lang Syne" again and have some more champagne. Beyond this my imagination balks. It will not furnish me with any further possibilities concerning life on New Year's Island. It informs me that there are none.

Cousin Sulie and I don't see eye to eye on everything, but in this case we agree. "I wouldn't go to that party island," she said. "I always did hate New Year's Eve."

I noticed that one element of the entertainment in the great courtyard was a Chinese New Year in San Francisco Dragon Parade. The natives in the picture look far more convincing as Chinese Americans than as cupids or elves or Revolutionary soldiers crossing the Delaware. It got me to wondering if there were any, as it were, un-American islands on the Great Joy Corporation plane. Sulie was vague about this. "There's lots of islands," she said. "Some of them might be foreign." With this and other questions in mind, I called my friend Sita Dulip. To my surprise, she had not even heard about the plane. I told her what I could and sent her all the literature I had.

After a week or two she called me back. She had tried to contact the Great Joy Corporation and had the expectable difficulty getting anywhere behind the 800 number. But Sita is knowledgeable and persistent, and she finally sweet-talked her way to somebody in Public Relations, who sent her a set of literature and fliers, much the same as those Sulie had collected, and also a list of memos on Island Projects. These had been generated by the PR and Development departments and were apparently under consideration by the decision makers of the corporation. They included: Isla Cinco de Mayo (a fully developed plan that is evidently about to be implemented)

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

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

Tét Everlasting (almost no details)

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

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

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

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

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

Sita sent me the new literature from Musu Sum. The island resorts are now being operated by the islanders themselves as a cooperative venture, supervised for the first year by expert advisers from the Agency. This makes sense, in that the modest subsistence economy of the region was completely destroyed by the Great Joy Corporation and cannot be restored overnight, while all the hotels and restaurants and roller coasters are in place, and people who have been trained to serve and entertain the tourists might as well use and profit by their training. On the other hand, it boggles the mind a bit. Especially Fourth Island. An orgiastic monument of American sentimental nationalism operated entirely by people who know nothing about the United States except that they were ruthlessly used by Americans for years? Well, I suppose it is not wholly improbable even on this plane. Exploitation can cut two ways. I have met a native of Musu Sum, one of the first to take advantage of his people's newly regained freedom to travel; Sita asked him to come by and see me. He thanked me most graciously for my part in the liberation of his people. That it was a totally accidental and tangential part made no difference to

Esmo So Mu. He gave me as a "gift of the gratitude of my people" a little wickerwork ball, a child's toy, rather crudely made. "We don't make such beautiful things like Americans," he said apologetically, but I think he saw that I was touched by the gift.

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

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

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

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

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

WAKE ISLAND

PEOPLE WHO SLEEP ONLY two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. On the plane of the Orichi, which is in many ways very similar to ours, there are people who don't sleep at all.

A group of scientists in the Orichi nation of Hy Brisal became convinced that sleep was a vestigial behavior pattern appropriate to lower mammals but not to sapient humans. Sleep might serve to keep vulnerable simians quiet and out of harm's way at night, but is as irrelevant to civilised life as hibernation would be. Worse, it is an impediment to intelligence --a recurrent damper on the brain. By interrupting the brain's ongoing functions every night, by grossly interfering with coherent thought, sleep prevents the human mind from attaining its maximum potential. Sleep makes us stupid, was the motto of the Orichi scientists. Their government, fearing invasion from the rival nation of Nuum, encouraged any experimentation that might give Hy Brisal the edge in weaponry or brainpower. So, well funded, working with brilliant genetic engineers, and provided with ten patriotic pairs of fertile volunteers, all housed in a closed-gate compound, these scientists began a program, nicknamed Su-persmarts by the national news net, which eagerly supported it. And in four years the first entirely sleepless babies were born. (Millions of bleary-eyed young parents might dispute that statement; but the usual baby does go to sleep, after all, just about the time its parents have to get up.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

For several months Ha Dab, a pretty little fellow with big eyes and silvery, curly hair, was the darling of the Hy Brisalian media. He was on everybody's homescreen—"Smartsyboy." Here was Ha Dab lurching cheerily across a room to greet the Scientist General, Doctor Master Professor Uy Tug, author of Asomnia: The Answer, who stooped with a pinched though genuine smile to shake his tiny hand. Here was Ha Dab rolling in the grass with the blapdog puppy presented to him by the Supreme Pinnacular of Hy Brisal. Here was Ha Dab cuddling down in his little bed as if to sleep, thumb in mouth, but popping up again bright-eyed to mug at the cam man. Then Smartsyboy faded from the net, as all fads fade. For over a year little was heard about the Supersmarts program. The Hy-Brisalian Highly Intellectual Net Locus then ran a noninteractive informational video which—carefully—raised some questions concerning the validity of asomnist theory and the supersmartness of the Supersmarts test children. The most telling part of the presentation was a brief scene of Ha Dab, now three and a half and fully asomnic, playing with his blap-dog. They were both charming little creatures, having a wonderful time roughhousing in the compound park, but it was rather troubling to see that the naked child followed the dog around instead of the dog following the child. Ha Dab also seemed curiously indifferent to the presence of strangers. When asked questions, he sometimes ignored the speaker and sometimes responded at random, as if neither speech nor human relationship meant much to him. Asked

"Are you in school now?," he wandered off a few steps and squatted down right before the cameras to defecate. There seemed to be nothing defiant about his action. It was purely shameless.

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

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

This did not quite satisfy the homescreen audience, or the maverick scientists who had questioned the theory of asom-nism, or even the government which was supporting Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug's program in hopes of a generation of geniuses who would bring Nuum to its knees and confirm Hy Brisal as the supermost superpower in the world. After a good deal of time and pressure and committee meetings, a Committee of Scientific Investigation charged with making a disinterested report was forced upon the fiercely resistant Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug and his staff. The investigators found many of the parents of the Super-smarts pathetically eager to talk to them, begging for advice, help, treatment for their children. One after another, these loving and desperate mothers and fathers said the same words: "They're sleepwalking." One young mother, uneducated but observant, set her little boy down in front of a mirror and told the investigator to watch him. "Mi Min," she said to the child, "look, Mi Min, who's that in the mirror? Who's thai, honey? That little boy, what's he doing?" But the child "did not relate in any way to the image," as the investigator wrote. "He showed no interest in it. He never looked into the eyes of the mirror image. Later I noticed that though his glance sometimes crossed mine at random, he did not look into my eyes, nor could I look into his. I found this curiously disquieting." The same investigator was also disturbed by the fact that none of the children pointed at anything or followed the direction of a pointing finger.

"Animals and young infants," he wrote, "look at the finger rather than at the direction pointed at, and do not point themselves. Pointing as a meaningful and understood gesture is a normal spontaneous development occurring in an infant's first year."

The Supersmarts obeyed direct, simple orders, erratically. If told, "Go to the kitchen," or "Sit down," they often did so. If asked "Are you hungry?," a child might or might not go to the kitchen or to the table to receive food. When hurt, none of the children would run to an adult crying about the

"owie." They just crouched down, whimpering or silent. A father said, "It's like he doesn't know it happened to him, like something happened but he doesn't know it happened to him." He added proudly, "He's tough. A real soldier. Never asks for help."

Spoken endearments seemed to mean nothing to the children, though if offered a physical embrace they might nuzzle or cuddle up to the speaker. Sometimes a child would say or hum endearments—"Nice nice nice,"

"Mama soft, mama soft"—but not in response to loving words from the parent. They responded to their names, and most of them if asked their name would say it, though some did not. The parents reported that they increasingly seemed to "just talk to themselves" or "just don't listen" and that their use of pronouns was often ar-bitrary-"you" for "I," or "me" for

"them." All their speech seemed to be increasingly spontaneous not responsive, random not purposive.

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

The conclusion of the investigators was that "permanent wakefulness appears to prevent the brain from achieving full consciousness." The media screamed with gusto for a month about Zombie Tots—the Waking Brain-Dead—Programmed Autism—Infant Sacrifice on Altar of Science—"Why Won't They Let Me Sleep, Mommy?"—and then lost interest.

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

Many of the supervising scientists had left the compound already. Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug suffered a heart attack and died. The distraught parents of the Supersmarts—who had been forced to stay in the compound all these years, well fed and clothed of course and with access to all modern conveniences except communicative devices—got out and yelled for help. Their children were now fifteen to seventeen years old and entirely sleepless. With puberty, they had fully entered into the state some observers described as altered consciousness, others as waking unconsciousness, and others as sleepwalking. The last word was particularly inappropriate. They were anything but asleep. Nor were they oblivious to their surroundings, as is the sleepwalker who wanders out into traffic or tries to scrub the damn'd spot from her hands. They were physically aware at all times. They were never not aware. Bodily they were healthy. Because they were fed well and regularly, with food always available, they had no hunting or foraging skills. They walked about, ran aimlessly, sometimes swinging on the playsets furnished them or from tree branches in the park, scratching the dirt into pits and heaps and wrestling with one another. As they matured, these puppy fights had begun to lead to sex play and soon to copulation.

Two mothers and a father had committed suicide during the long captivity, and a father had died of a stroke. The forty remaining parents had kept up a round-the-clock watch for years, trying to restrain their children: twelve adolescent girls and ten adolescent boys, all awake all the time. The conditions of the experiment prevented the parents from locking any doors; they could not keep the young people from access to one another. The parents' pleas for locks and contraceptives had been rejected by Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug, who was convinced that the second generation of asomnics would fully vindicate his theory, as expounded in the unpublished manuscript ofAsom-nia: The Answer Is to Come. When the compound was opened, four of the girls had had babies, which were being looked after by the grandparents. Three more of the girls were pregnant. One of the mothers had been raped by one of the asomnic boys and was also pregnant. She was permitted to abort the fetus.

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

The second generation failed to vindicate Uy Tug's theory but proved the skill of the genetic engineers: they bred absolutely true. No descendant of the Supersmarts has been capable of sleep after the age of five. There are now about fifty-five asomnics on Wake Island. The climate is very warm, and they go naked. Fruit, cheese, bread, and other foods that need no preparation are left on the shore by an army jetboat every second day. Except for these provisions, tossed ashore from the boat, a strict no-contact policy is maintained. No humanitarian or medical aid is permitted. Tourists, including those from other planes, are allowed on a neighboring islet, where they can catch glimpses of the asomnics from a blind through high-power telescopes. Teams of scientific observers are occasionally lowered from helicopters into two observation towers on the island itself. These towers, inaccessible to the asomnics, are equipped with infrared and other highly sophisticated viewing devices; the observers are hidden behind one-way glass. Pickets from the Save the Asomnic Babies Association are permitted to march and keep vigils on the south shore. From time to time these SABA activists make rescue attempts by boat, but the army jetboats and helicopters have always forestalled them. The asomnics bask, walk, run, climb, swing, wrestle, groom themselves and one another, hold and suckle babies, and have sex. Males fight in sexual rivalry and often beat females who reject intercourse. All fight occasionally over food, and there have been a number of apparently causeless killings. Group rape is common, when males are excited by seeing others copulate. There are some indications of affectional bonding between mother and infant and between siblings. Otherwise there are no social relations. No teaching occurs, and there is no sign of individuals learning skills or customs by imitation.

Most of the females bear a child a year from the age of thirteen or fourteen on. Their maternal skills can only be innate, and the question of whether human beings have any innate skills has not yet been settled; in any case, most of the babies die. The mothers leave dead babies where they lie. After weaning, children fend for themselves; since an excess of food is always provided, a fair number of them survive to puberty. Adult female death is usually from brutality or complications of childbirth. Female asomnics seldom reach thirty years. Males live longer, if they survive the dangerous late teens and early twenties when fighting is all but constant. The longest-lived inhabitant of Wake Island, FB-204, nicknamed Fibby by the observer team, was a female who lived to seventy-one. Fibby bore one infant at age fourteen and was apparently sterile thereafter. She never rejected a male's effort to copulate and so was seldom beaten. She was shy and very lazy, rarely appearing on the beach except to pick up food and retreat into the trees with it. The current patriarch is a grizzled male, MTT-311, fifty-six years old, muscular and well-made. He spends most days basking on the sand beaches, and at night roams endlessly through the forests of the interior. Sometimes he digs holes and ditches with his hands, or piles up rocks to dam a creek, apparently for the physical pleasure of doing so, as the dams serve no purpose and are never made watertight enough to divert the stream. One of the young females spends a part of almost every night building up piles of torn bark and leaves like huge nests, though she never uses them for anything. Several females hunt for ants or grubs in fallen trees and eat them one by one. These are the only observed evidences of purposive behavior beyond the fulfillment of immediate physical needs. Though they are extremely unclean and the females age quickly, most asomnics are handsome in youth. All observers comment on their expression, described as bland, serene, su-pernally calm. A recent book about the asomnics was entitled "The Happy People"—with the Orichi equivalent of a question mark.

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

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

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

The poem "Wake Island," by Nu Lap, portrays the asomnics as spending their whole life "in a dream of dreams..." Dreams of waters flowing always by the sandbars dreams of bodies meeting, opening like deep flowers, dreams of eyes forever open to the sun and stars...

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

As on our plane, only certain animals, including birds, dogs, cats, horses, apes, and humans, regularly enter the peculiar and highly specific brain)body condition known as sleep. Once there, and only there, some of them enter the even more peculiar state or activity, characterised by highly specific brainwave types and frequencies, called dreaming. The asomnics lack these states of being. Their brains do not do this. They are like reptiles, who chill down into inertia but do not sleep. A Hy Brisalian philosopher, To Had, elaborates these paradoxes: To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing. The asomnics know the world continuously and immediately, with no empty time, no room for selfhood. Having no dreams, they tell no stories and so have no use for language. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future. They live here, now, perfectly in touch. They live in pure fact. But they can't live in truth, because the way to truth, says the philosopher, is through lies and dreams.

THE NNA MMOY LANGUAGE

THE "GARDEN UTOPIA" of the Nna Mmoy deservedly enjoys the reputation of being absolutely safe—"an ideal plane for children and elderly people." The few visitors who come, including children and the aged, usually find it very dull and leave as soon as possible. The scenery is all the same everywhere—hills, fields, park-lands, woods, villages: a fertile, pretty, seasonless monotony. Cultivated land and wilderness look exactly alike. The few species of plants are all useful, yielding food or wood or fabric. There is no animal life except bacteria, some creatures resembling jellyfish in the oceans, two species of useful insect, and the Nna Mmoy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purported translations of the written texts are either meaningless or ridiculously various. For example, I have come upon four different translations of the same nine-character inscription: "All within this space are to be considered friends, as are all creatures under heaven."

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

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

"Enter boldly, stranger, and be welcome. Sit down now." This inscription, the characters of which are written so as to form a shape like a comet with a radiant head, is often found on doors, box lids, and book covers.

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

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

There are many traces on the Nna Mmoy plane of what people from our plane call civilisation, by which people from our plane, these days, usually mean a capitalist economy and an industrial technology based on intense, exhaustive exploitation of natural and human resources. Ruins of immense cities, traces of long roads and huge paved areas, vast wastelands of desertification and permanent pollution, and other evidences of progressive society and advanced scientific technology crop up among the fields and border the parklands. All are very ancient and seem to be quite meaningless to the Nna Mmoy, who regard them without awe or interest.

Which is how they also regard visitors.

No one understands the language well enough to know if the Nna Mmoy have any history or legends of the ancestors responsible for the vast works and destructions that litter their placid landscape.

My friend Laure says that he heard the Nna Mmoy use a word in connection with the ruins: nen. As well as he could figure out, the syllable nen, variously modified by the syllables that surround it, may signify a range of objects from a flash flood to a tiny iridescent beetle. He thought the central area of connotation of nen might be "things that move fast" or

"events occurring quickly." It seems an odd name to give the timeless, grass-grown ruins that loom above the villages or serve as their foundations—the cracked and sunken tracts of pavement that are now the silted bottoms of shallow lakes—the immense chemical deserts where nothing grows except a thin, purplish bloom of bacteria on poisonous water seeps.

But then, it's not certain that anything has a name in Nna Mmoy. Laure has spent more time in the "garden utopia" than most people. I asked him to write me anything he wanted about it. He sent the following letter:

YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LANGUAGE. You've described the problem well, I think. It might help to think of it this way:

We talk snake. A snake can go any direction but only one direction at one time, following its head.

They talk starfish. A starfish doesn't go anywhere much. It has no head. It keeps more choices handy, even if it doesn't use them. I imagine that starfish don't think about alternatives, like left or right, forward or back; they'd think in terms of five kinds of lefts and rights, five kinds of backs and forths. Or twenty kinds of lefts and rights, twenty kinds of backs and forths. The only either)or for a starfish would be up and down. The other dimensions or directions or choices would be either)or)or)or)or...

Well, that describes one aspect of their language. When you say something in Nna Mmoy, there is a center to what you say, but the statement goes in more than one direction from the center—or to the center.

In Japanese, I'm told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that—I don't know Japanese, I'm making this up—if a syllable changes in one word, then "the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight" becomes "the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection." I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.

Well, everything you say in Nna Mmoy is like that. Every statement is transparent to other possible statements because the meaning of every word is contingent on the meanings of the words around it. Which is why you probably can't call them words.

A word in our languages is a real thing, a sound with a fixed form to it. Take cat. In a sentence or standing by itself, it has a meaning: a certain kind of animal; in talking it's the same three phonemes, and in writing the same three letters c, a, t, plus maybe s, and there it is, cat. As distinct as a pebble. Or as a cat. Cat is a noun. Verbs are a little shiftier. What does it mean if you say the word had? All by itself? Not much. Had isn't like cat, it needs context, a subject, an object.

No word in Nna Mmoy is like cat. Every word in Nna Mmoy is like had, only more so, much more so.

Take the syllable dde. It doesn't have a meaning yet. A no dde mil as, that means more or less "Let's go into the woods"; in that context dde is

"woods." But if you say Dim a dde mil as, that means, more or less, "The tree stands beside the road": dde is "tree" and a is "road" instead of "go," and as is "beside" instead of "into." But then if that connotation group occurred inside other groups, it would change again—Hse vuy uno a dde mu as med as hro se se: "The travelers came through the desert where nothing grows." Now dde is "desert land," not "trees." And in o be k'a dde k'a, the syllable dde means "generous, giving freely"—nothing to do with trees at all, unless maybe metaphorically. The phrase means, more or less,

"Thank you."

The range of meanings of a syllable isn't infinite, of course, but I don't think you could make a list of the possible or potential meanings. Not even a long list, like the entry for a syllable in Chinese dictionaries. A spoken Chinese syllable, hsing or lung, may have dozens of meanings; but it's still a word, even though its meaning depends to some extent on context, and even if it takes fifty different written characters to express the different meanings. Each different meaning of the syllable is in fact a different word, an entity, a pebble in the great riverbed of the language. A Nna Mmoy syllable only has one written character. But it's not a pebble. It's a drop in the river.

Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water. I believe it's just as difficult for them to learn their language as it is for us. But then, they have enough time, so it doesn't matter. Their lives don't start here and run to there, like ours, like horses on a racecourse. They live in the middle of time, like a starfish in its own center. Like the sun in its light. What little I know of the language—and I'm not really certain of any of it, despite my learned disquisition on dde—I learned mostly from children. Their children's words are more like our words, you can expect them to mean the same thing in different sentences. But the children keep learning; and when they begin learning to read and write, at ten or so, they begin to talk more like the adults; and by the time they're adolescents I couldn't understand much of what they said—unless they talked baby talk to me. Which they often did. Learning to read and write is a lifelong occupation. I suspect it involves not only learning the characters but inventing new ones, and new combinations of them—beautiful new patterns of meaning.

They're gardeners. Things there pretty much grow on their own—no weeding, no weeds, no spraying, no pests. Still, you know how it is, in a garden there's always something to be done. In the village where I stayed there was always somebody working away in the gardens and among the trees. Nobody ever wore themselves out doing it. Then they'd gather, along in the afternoon, under the trees, and they'd talk and laugh, having one of their long, long conversations.

The talking often ended up with people reciting, or getting out a paper or a book and reading from it. Some of them would already be off reading by themselves, or writing. A lot of people wrote every day, very slowly, of course, on flimsy bits of the paper they make out of cotton plant. They might bring that piece of writing to the group in the afternoon and pass it around, and people would read from it aloud. Or some people would be at the village workshop working on a piece of jewelry, the circlets and brooches and complicated necklaces they make out of gold wire and opals and amethysts and such. When those were finished they'd get shown around too, and given away, and worn first by one person then another; nobody kept those pieces. They passed around. There was some of the shell money in the village, and sometimes, if somebody won a heap of it playing ten-tiles, they'd offer the owner of a fine piece of jewelry a shell or two for it, usually with a good deal of laughter and what seemed to be ritual insults. Some of the pieces of jewelry were wonderful things, delicate armpieces like endless filigree, or great massive necklaces shaped like starbursts and interlocking spirals. Several times I was given one. That's when I learned to say o be k'a dde k'a. I'd wear it for a while, and pass it on. Much as I would have liked to keep it.

I finally realised that some of the pieces of jewelry were sentences, or lines of poems. Maybe they all were.

There was a village school under a nut tree. The climate is very mild and dull, it never varies, so you can live outdoors. It seemed to be all right with everybody if I sat in at school and listened. Children would gather under that tree daily and play, until one or another of the villagers showed up and taught them one thing or another. Most of it seemed to be language practice, by way of storytelling. The teacher would start a story and then a child would carry it on a way, and then another would pick it up, and so on, everybody listening very intently, alert, ready to take over. The subjects were just village doings, as far as I could tell, pretty dull stuff, but there were twists and jokes, and an unexpected or inventive usage or connection caused a lot of pleasure and praise—"A jewel!" they'd all say. Now and then a regular teacher would wander by, doing a round of the villages, and have a session for a day or two or three, teaching writing and reading. Adolescents and some adults would come to hear the teacher, along with the children. That's how I learned to read a few characters in certain texts. The villagers never tried to ask me about myself or where I came from. They had no curiosity ofthat kind at all. They were kind, patient, generous, sharing food, giving me a house, letting me work with them, but they were not interested in me. Or in anything, as far as I could tell, except their daily pursuits—gardening, preparing food, making jewelry, writing, and conversation. But conversation only with one another.

Like everybody else, I found their language so difficult that they probably thought me retarded. I made the usual attempts to learn by exchanging words—you hit your chest and say your name and look inquiringly at the person facing you—you hold up a leaf and say "leaf" and look hopefully at the person facing you... They simply did not respond. Not even the young children.

As far as I can tell, a Nna Mmoy does not have a name. They address one another by ever-varying phrases which seem to signify both permanent and temporary relationships of consanguinity, of responsibility and dependence, of contingent status, of a thousand social and emotional connections. I could point to myself and say "Laure," but what relationship would that signify?

I suspect they heard my language as a noise made by an idiot. Nothing else in their world speaks. Nothing else has sentience, let alone intelligence. In their world there is only one language. They recognised me as a human being, but as a defective one. I couldn't talk. I couldn't make the connections.

I had with me a magazine, a publication of an American conservation organisation, which I'd been reading in the airport. I brought it out one day and offered it to the conversation group. They didn't ask about the text or look at it with any interest. I'm sure they didn't recognise it as writing—a couple of dozen black characters, repeated endlessly in straight lines— nothing remotely like their marvelous swirls and fern fronds and interlocking superimplicated patterns. But they did look at the pictures. The magazine was full of color photographs of animals, endangered species—coral reefs and their fish, Florida panthers, manatees, California condors. It passed around the village, and people from other villages asked to look at it when they came visiting and bartering and conversing. They showed it to the schoolteacher when she came on her rounds, and she asked me about the pictures, the only time any Nna Mmoy tried to ask me a question. I think what she was asking was Who are these people?

In their world, you know, there are no animals but themselves. Except for little, harmless bees and flies, that pollinate plants or break down dead matter. All the plants are edible. The grass is a nourishing grain. Five kinds of trees, that all bear fruit or nuts. One kind of evergreen, used for wood, and it has edible nuts too. One ubiquitous shrub, a cotton bush which produces fiber to spin, edible roots, and leaves for tea. Aside from the necessary bacteria there aren't more than twenty or thirty species of animal or plant in the world. All of them, including the bacteria, are

"useful" and "harmless"—to human beings. Life there is a product of engineering. It was designed. Utopia indeed. Everything human beings need and nothing they don't need. Panthers, condors, manatees—who needs them?

Roman's Planary Guide says the Nna Mmoy are "degenerate remnants of a great ancient culture." Roman has things backward. What is degenerate on their plane is the web of life. The "great ancient culture" took a vast, rich, incalculably complex tapestry, like the life that clothes our world, and reduced it to a miserable scrap.

I am certain this terrible poverty dates from the age of the ruins. Their ancestors, with all the resources of science and all the best intentions, robbed them blind. Our world is full of diseases, enemies, waste, and danger, those ancestors said— hostile microbes and viruses infecting us, noxious weeds growing thick about us while we starve, useless animals that carry plagues and poisons and compete with us for air and food and water. This world is too hard for human beings to live in, too hard for our children, they said, but we know how to make it easy.

So they did. They eliminated everything that was not useful. They took a great complex pattern and simplified it to perfection. A nursery room safe for the children. A theme park where people have nothing to do but enjoy themselves.

But the Nna Mmoy outwitted their ancestors, at least in part. They've made the pattern back into something endlessly complicated, infinitely rich, and without any rational use. They do it with words. They don't have any representative arts. They decorate their pottery and whatever else they make only with their beautiful writing. The only way they imitate the world is by putting words together: that is, by letting words interrelate in a fertile, ever-changing complexity to form shapes and patterns that have never existed before, beautiful forms that exist briefly and create and give way to other forms. Their language is their own exuberant, endlessly proliferating ecology. All the jungle they have, all the wilderness, is their poetry.

As I said, the pictures in my magazine interested them, the pictures of animals. They gazed at them with what seemed to me an

uncomprehending wistfulness. I told them the names, pointing out the word written as I spoke it. And they'd repeat: Pan dhedh. Kon dodh. Ma na tii.

Those were the only words of my language they ever listened to, recognising that they had meaning.

I suppose they understood as much from those words as I did from the syllables of their language that I learned: very little, and probably all wrong.

I wandered around the ancient ruins near the village sometimes. I found a wall that had been revealed when one of the villages used the place as a rock quarry. There was a carving, a bas-relief, worn away by the ages, but as I studied it I began to see what it was: a procession of people, and there were other creatures in the procession. It was hard to make out what they were. Animals, certainly. Some were four-legged. One had great horns or wings. They might have been real animals or imaginary, or figures of animal gods. I tried to ask the teacher about them, but she just said, "Nen, nen."

THE BUILDING

From the unpublished Voyages to Qoq, Rehik, and Djg, by ThomasAtall, with the kind permission of the author

THE PLANE OF QOQ is unusual in having two rational, or more or less rational, species.

The Daqo are stocky, greenish-tan-colored humanoids. The Aq are taller and a little greener than the Daqo. The two species, though diverged from a common simioid ancestor, cannot interbreed.

Something over four thousand years ago the Daqo had what the Planar Encyclopedia refers to as an EEPT: a period of explosive expansion of population and technology.

Before it, the two species had seldom come in contact. The Aq inhabited the southern continent, the Daqo were in the northern hemisphere. The Daqo population escalated, spreading out over the three landmasses of the northern hemisphere and then to the south. As they conquered their world, they incidentally conquered the Aq.

The Daqo attempted to use the Aq as slaves for domestic or factory work but failed. It seems the Aq, though unaggres-sive, do not take orders. During the height of the EEPT the most expansive Daqo nations pursued a policy of slaughtering the "primitive" and "unteachable" Aq in the name of progress. Settlers of the equatorial zone pushed the remnant Aq populations farther south yet, into the deserts and the barely habitable canebrakes of the coast.

All species on Qoq, except a few pests and the insuperable and indifferent bacteria, suffered badly during and after the Daqo EEPT. In the final ecocatastrophe, the Daqo population dropped by four billion in four decades. The species has survived, living on a modest scale, vastly reduced in numbers and more interested in survival than dominion. As for the Aq, probably very few, perhaps only hundreds, survived the rapid destruction and final ruin of the planet's life web. Descent from this limited genetic source may help explain the prevalence of certain traits among the Aq, but the cultural expression of these tendencies is inexplicable in its uniformity. We don't know much about what they were like before the crash, but their reputed refusal to carry out the other species' orders suggests that they were already working, as it were, under orders of their own.

There are now about two million Daqo, mostly on the coasts of the south and the northwest continents. They live in small cities, towns, and farms and carry on agriculture and commerce; their technology is efficient but modest, limited both by the exhaustion of their world's resources and by strict religious sanctions.

There are probably fifteen or twenty thousand Aq, all on the southern continent. They live as gatherers and fishers, with some limited, casual agriculture. The only one of their domesticated animals to survive the die-offs is the boos, a clever creature descended from pack-hunting carnivores. The Aq hunted with boos when there were animals to hunt. Since the crash, they use boos to carry or haul light loads, as companions, and in hard times as food.

Aq villages are movable; from time immemorial their houses have been fabric domes stretched on a frame of light poles or canes, easy to set up, dismantle, and transport. The tall cane which grows in the swampy lakes of the desert and all along the coasts of the equatorial zone of the southern continent is their staple; they gather the young shoots for food, spin and weave the fiber into cloth, and make rope, baskets, and tools from the stems. When they have used up all the cane in a region, they pick up the village and move on. The cane plants regenerate from the root system in a few years.

The Aq have kept pretty much to the desert-and-canebrake habitat enforced upon them by the Daqo in earlier millennia. Some, however, camp around outside Daqo towns and engage in a little barter and filching. The Daqo trade with them for their fine canvas and baskets, and tolerate their thievery to a surprising degree.

Indeed the Daqo attitude to the Aq is hard to define. Wariness is part of it; a kind of unease that is not suspicion or distrust; a watchfulness that, surprisingly, stops short of animosity or contempt, and may even become conciliating.

It is even harder to say what the Aq think of the Daqo. The two populations communicate in a pidgin or jargon containing elements from both languages, but it appears that no individual ever learns the other species' language. The two species seem to have settled on coexistence without relationship. They have nothing to do with each other except for these occasional, slightly abrasive contacts at the edges of southern Daqo settlements—and a limited, very strange collaboration having to do with what I can only call the specific obsession of the Aq. I am not comfortable with the phrase "specific obsession," but "cultural instinct" is worse.

At about two and a half or three years old, Aq babies begin building. Whatever comes into their little greeny-bronze hands that can possibly serve as a block or brick they pile up into "houses." The Aq use the same word for these miniature structures as for the fragile cane-and-canvas domes they live in, but there is no resemblance except that both are roofed enclosures with a door. The children's "houses" are rectangular, flat-roofed, and always made of solid, heavy materials. They are not imitations of Daqo houses, or only at a very great remove, since most of these children have never been to a Daqo town, never seen a Daqo building.

It is hard to believe that they imitate one another with such unanimity that they never vary the plan; but it is even harder to believe that their building style, like that of insects, is innate.

As the children get older and more skillful they build larger constructions, though still no more than knee high, with passages, courtyards, and sometimes towers. Many children spend all their free time gathering rocks or making mud bricks and building "houses." They do not populate their buildings with toy people or animals or tell stories about them. They just build them, with evident pleasure and satisfaction. By the age of six or seven some children begin to leave off building, but others go on working together with other children, often under the guidance of interested adults, to make "houses" of considerable complexity, though still not large enough for anyone to live in. The children do not play in them.

When the village picks up and moves to a new gathering ground or canebrake, these children leave their constructions behind without any sign of distress. As soon as they are settled, they begin building again, often cannibalising stones or bricks from the "houses" a previous generation left on the site. Popular gathering sites are marked by dozens or hundreds of solidly built miniature ruins, populated only by the joint-legged gikoto of the marshes or the little ratlike hikiqi of the desert. No such ruins have been found in areas where the Aq lived before the Daqo conquest. Evidently their propensity to build was less strong, or didn't exist, before the conquest, or before the crash. Two or three years after their ceremonies of adolescence some of the young people, those who went on building "houses" until they reached puberty, will go on their first stone faring.

A stone faring sets out once a year from the Aq territories. The complete journey takes from two to three years, after which the travelers return to their natal village for five or six years. Some Aq never go stone faring, others go once, some go several or many times in their life. The route of the stone farings is to the coast of Riqim, on the northeast continent, and back to the Mediro, a rocky plateau far inland from the southernmost canebrakes of the great south continent.

The Aq stone farers gather in spring, coming overland or by cane raft from their various villages to Gatbam, a small port near the equator on the west coast. There a fleet of cane-and-canvas sailboats awaits them. The sailors and navigators are all Daqo of the south continent. They are professional sailors, mostly fishermen; some of them "sail the faring" every year for decades. The Aq pilgrims have nothing to pay them with, arriving with provisions for the journey but nothing else. While at Riqim, the Daqo sailors will net and salt fish from those rich waters, a catch which makes their journey profitable. But they never go to fish off Riqim except with the stone-faring fleet.

The journey takes several weeks. The voyage north is the dangerous one, made early in the year so that the return voyage, carrying the cargo, may be made at the optimal time. Now and then boats or even whole fleets are lost in the wild tropical storms ofthat wide sea.

As soon as they disembark on the stony shores of Riqim, the Aq get to work. Under the direction of senior stone farers, the novices set up domed tents, store their sparse provisions, take up the tools left there by the last pilgrimage, and climb the steep green cliffs to the quarries. Riqimite is a lustrous, fine-textured, greenish stone with a tendency to cleave along a plane. It can be sawed in blocks or split into stone planks or smaller tiles and even into sheets so thin they are translucent. Though relatively light, it is stone, and a ten-meter canvas sailboat can't carry great quantities of it; so the stone farers carefully gauge the amount they quarry. They rough-shape the blocks at Riqim and even do some of the fine cutting, so that the boats carry as little waste as possible. They work fast, since they want to start home in the calm season around the solstice. When their work is complete they run up a flag on a high pole on the cliffs to signal the Daqo fleet, which comes in boat by boat over the next few days. They load the stone aboard under the tubs of salted fish and set sail back south.

The boats put in at one Daqo port or another, usually the crew's home port, to unload and sell their fish; then they all sail on several hundred kilometers down the coast to Gazt, a long, shallow harbor in the hot marshlands south of the canebrake country. There the sailors help the Aq unload the stone. They receive no payment for or profit from this part of the trip.

I asked a shipmaster who had "sailed the faring" many times why she and her sailors were willing to take the Aq stone farers down to Gazt. She shrugged. "It's part of the agreement," she said, evidently not having thought much about it. After thinking, she added, "Be an awful job to drag that stone overland through the marshes."

Before the Daqo boats have sailed halfway back to the harbor mouth, the Aq have begun loading the stone onto wheeled flatbed carts left on the docks of Gazt by the last stone faring. Then they get into harness and haul these carts five hundred kilometers inland and three thousand meters upward. They go at most three or four kilometers a day. They encamp before evening and fan out from the trails to forage and set snares for hikiqi, since by now their supplies are low. The cart train follows the least recently used of the several winding trails, because the hunting and gathering will be better along it.

During the sea voyages and at Riqim the mood of the stone farers tends to be solemn and tense. They are not sailors, and the labor at the quarries is hard and driven. Hauling carts by shoulder harness is certainly not light work either, but the pilgrims take it merrily; they talk and joke while hauling, share their food and sit talking around their campfires, and behave like any group of people engaged willingly in an arduous joint enterprise.

They discuss which path to take, and wheel-mending techniques, and so on. But when I went with them I never heard them talk in the larger sense about what they were doing, their journey's goal.

All the paths finally have to surmount the cliffs at the edge of the plateau. As the stone farers come up onto the level after that terrible last grade, they stop and gaze to the southeast. One after another the long, flat carts laden with dusty stone buck and jerk up over the rim and stop. The haulers stand in harness, gazing silent at the Building. AFTER HUNDREDS OF YEARS of the slow recovery of the shattered ecosystem, enough Aq began to have enough food to have enough energy for activities beyond forage and storage. It was then, when bare survival was still chancy, that they began the stone faring.

So few of them, in such an inimical world, the atmosphere damaged, the great cycles of life not yet reestablished in the poisoned and despoiled oceans, the lands full of bones, ghosts, ruins, dead forests, deserts of salt, of sand, of chemical waste— how did the inhabitants of such a world think of undertaking such a task? How did they know the stone they wanted was at Riqim? How did they know where Riqim was? Did they originally make their way there somehow without Daqo boats and navigators? The origins of the stone faring are absolutely mysterious, but no more mysterious than its object. All we know is that every stone in the Building comes from the quarries of Riqim, and that the Aq have been building it for over three thousand, perhaps four thousand years.

It is immense, of course. It covers many acres and contains thousands of rooms, passages, and courts. It is certainly one of the largest edifices, perhaps the largest single one, on any world we know. And yet declarations of size, counts and measures, comparisons and superlatives, are meaningless. The fact is, a technology such as that of contemporary Earth, or the ancient Daqo, could build a building ten times bigger in ten years.

It is possible that the ever-increasing vastness of the Building is a metaphor or illustration of precisely such a factual enormity. Or the Building's size may be purely a result of its age. The oldest sections, far inside its outermost walls, show no indication that they were—or were not—seen as the beginning of something immense. They are exactly like the Aq children's "houses" on a larger scale. All the rest of the Building has been added on, year by year, to this modest beginning, in much the same style. After perhaps some centuries the builders began to add stories onto the flat roofs of the early Building, but have never gone above four stories, except for towers and pinnacles and the airy barrel domes that reach a height of perhaps sixty meters. The great bulk of the Building is no more than five to six meters high. Inevitably it has kept growing outwards laterally, by way of ells and wings and joining arcades and courtyards, until it covers so vast an area that from a distance it looks like a fantastic terrain, a low mountain landscape all in silvery green stone.

Although not dwarfish like the children's structures, curiously enough the Building is not quite full scale, taking the average height of an Aq as measure. The ceilings are barely high enough to allow them to stand straight, and they must stoop to pass through the doors. No part of the Building is ruined or in disrepair, though occasional earthquakes shake the Mediro plateau. Damaged areas are repaired annually, or "mined" for stone to rebuild with. The work is fine, careful, sure, and delicate. No material is used but riqimite, mortised and tenoned like wood, or set in exquisitely fitted blocks and courses. The indoor surfaces are mostly finished satin smooth, the outer faces left in contrasting degrees of roughness and smoothness. There is no carving or ornamentation other than thin moldings or incised lines repeating and outlining the architectural shapes. Windows are unglazed stone lattices or pierced stone sheets cut so thin as to be translucent. The repetitive rectangular designs of the latticework are elegantly proportioned; a ratio of three to two runs through many though not all of the Building's rooms and apertures. Doors are thin stone slabs so well balanced and pivoted that they swing lightly and smoothly open and shut. There are no furnishings.

Empty rooms, empty corridors, miles of corridors, endlessly similar stairways, ramps, courtyards, roof terraces, delicate towers, vistas of roof beyond roof, tower beyond tower, dome beyond dome to the far distance; high rooms lighted by great lacework windows or only by the dim, greenish, mottled translucency of windowpanes of stone; corridors that lead to other corridors, other rooms, stairs, ramps, courtyards, corridors

... Is it a maze, a labyrinth? Yes, inevitably; but is that what it was built to be?

Is it beautiful? Yes, in a way, wonderfully beautiful; but is that what it was built to be?

The Aq are a rational species. They have language. Answers to these questions must come from them.

The troubling thing is that they have many different answers, none of which seems quite satisfying to them or anyone else.

In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications—for instance, that we are an aggressive species—are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey our deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom.

In the same way, the efforts of the Aq to explain or justify their building and their Building all invoke a necessity which doesn't seem all that necessary and use reasons which meet themselves coming around. We go stone faring because we have always done it. We go to Riqim because the best stone is there. The Building is on the Mediro because the ground's good and there's room for it there. The Building is a great undertaking, which our children can look forward to and our men and women can work together on. The stone faring brings people from all our villages together. We were only a poor scattered people in the old days, but now the Building shows that there is a great vision in us. —All these reasons make sense but don't convince, don't satisfy.

Perhaps the questions should be asked of those Aq who never have gone stone faring. They don't question the stone faring. They speak of the stone farers as people doing something brave, difficult, worthy, perhaps sacred. So why have you never gone yourself? —Well, I never felt the need to. People who go, they have to go, they're called to it.

What about the other people, the Daqo? What do they think about this immense structure, certainly the greatest enterprise and achievement on their world at this time? Very little, evidently. Even the sailors of the stone faring never go up onto the Mediro and know nothing about the Building except that it is there and is very large. Daqo of the northwest continent know it only as rumor, fable, travelers' tales of the "Palace of the Mediro" on the Great South Continent. Some tales say the

King of the Aq lives there in unimaginable splendor; some say that it is a tower taller than the mountains, in which eyeless monsters dwell; others that it is a maze where the unwary traveler is lost in endless corridors foil of bones and ghosts; others that the winds blowing through it moan in huge chords like a vast aeolian harp, which can be heard for hundreds of miles; and so on. To the Daqo it is a legend, like their own legends of the ancient times when their mighty ancestors flew in the air and drank rivers dry and turned forests into stone and built towers taller than the sky, and so on. Fairy tales.

Now and then an Aq who has been stone faring will say something different about the Building. If asked about it, some of them reply: "It is for the Daqo."

Indeed the Building is better proportioned to the short stature of the Daqo than to the tall Aq. The Daqo, if they ever went there, could walk through the corridors and doorways upright.

An old woman of Katas, who had been five times a stone farer, was the first who gave me that answer.

"The Building is for the Daqo?" I said, taken aback. "But why?"

"Because of the old days."

"But they never go there."

"It isn't finished," she said.

"A retribution?" I asked, puzzling at it. "A recompense?"

"They need it," she said.

"The Daqo need it, but you don't?"

"No," the old woman said with a smile. "We build it. We don't need it." 

THE FLIERS OF GY

THE PEOPLE OF GY look pretty much like people from our plane except that they have plumage, not hair. A fine, fuzzy down on the heads of infants becomes a soft, short coat of speckled dun on the fledglings, and with adolescence this grows out into a full head of feathers. Most men have ruffs at the back of the neck, shorter feathers all over the head, and tall, erectile crests. The head plumage of males is brown or black, barred and marked variously with bronze, red, green, and blue. Women's plumes usually grow long, sometimes sweeping down the back almost to the floor, with soft, curling, trailing edges, like the tails of ostriches; the colors of the feathers of women are vivid—purple, scarlet, coral, turquoise, gold. Gyr men and women are downy in the pubic region and pit of the arm and often have short, fine plumage over the whole body. People with brightly colored body feathers are a cheerful sight when naked, but they are much troubled by lice and nits.

Moulting is a continuous process, not seasonal. As people age, not all the moulted feathers grow back, and patchy baldness is common among both men and women over forty. Most people, therefore, save the best of their head feathers as they moult out, to make into wigs or false crests as needed. Those whose plumage is scanty or dull can also buy feather wigs at special shops. There are fads for bleaching one's feathers or spraying them gold or curling them, and wig shops in the cities will bleach, dye, spray, or crimp one's plumage and sell headdresses in whatever the current fashion is. Poor women with specially long, splendid head feathers often sell them to the wig shops for a fairly good price. The Gyr write with quill pens. It is traditional for a father to give a set of his own stiff ruff quills to a child beginning to learn to write. Lovers exchange feathers with which they write love letters to one another, a pretty custom, referred to in a famous scene in the play The Misunderstanding by Inuinui:

O my betraying plume, that wrote his love

To her! His love—my feather, and my blood!

The Gyr are a staid, steady, traditional people, uninterested in innovation, shy of strangers. They are resistant to technological invention and novelty; attempts to sell them ballpoint pens or airplanes, or to induce them to enter the wonderful world of electronics, have failed. They continue writing letters to one another with quill pens, calculating with their heads, walking afoot or riding in carriages pulled by large, doglike animals called ugnunu, learning a few words in foreign languages when absolutely necessary, and watching classic stage plays written in traditional meters. No amount of exposure to the useful technologies, the marvelous gadgets, the advanced scientific knowledge of other planes—for Gy is a fairly popular tourist stop— seems to rouse envy or greed or a sense of inferiority in the Gyran bosom. They go on doing exactly as they have always done, not stodgily, exactly, but with a kind of dullness, a polite indifference and impenetrability, behind which may lie supreme self-satisfaction, or something quite different.

The crasser kind of tourists from other planes refer to the Gyr, of course, as birdies, birdbrains, featherheads, and so on. Many visitors from livelier planes visit the small, placid cities, take rides out into the country in ugnunu chaises, attend sedate but charming balls (for the Gyr like to dance), and enjoy an old-fashioned evening at the theater, without losing one degree of their contempt for the natives. "Feathers but no wings" is the conventional judgment that sums it up.

Such patronising visitors may spend a week in Gy without ever seeing a winged native or learning that what they took for a bird or a jet was a woman on her way across the sky.

The Gyr don't talk about their winged people unless asked. They don't conceal them or lie about them, but they don't volunteer information. I had to ask questions fairly persistently to be able to write the following description.

Wings never develop before late adolescence. There is no sign at all of the propensity until suddenly a girl of eighteen, a boy of nineteen, wakes up with a slight fever and an ache in the shoulder blades. After that comes a year or more of great physical stress and pain, during which the subject must be kept quiet, warm, and well-fed. Nothing gives comfort but food—the nascent fliers are terribly hungry most of the time—and being wrapped or swaddled in blankets, while the body restructures, remakes, rebuilds itself. The bones lighten and become porous, the whole upper body musculature changes, and bony protuberances, developing rapidly from the shoulder blades, grow out into immense alar processes. The final stage is the growth of the wing feathers, which is not painful. The primaries are, as feathers go, massive, and may be a meter long. The wingspread of an adult male Gyr is about four meters, that of a woman usually about a half meter less. Stiff feathers sprout from the calves and ankles, to be spread wide in flight. Any attempt to interfere, to prevent or halt the growth of wings, is useless and harmful or fatal. If the wings are not allowed to develop, the bones and muscles begin to twist and shrivel, causing unendurable, unceasing pain. Amputation of the wings or the flight feathers, at any stage, results in a slow, agonising death.

Among some of the most conservative, archaic peoples of the Gyr, the tribal societies living along the icy coasts of the north polar regions and the herdsfolk of the cold, barren steppes of the far south, this vulnerability of the winged people is incorporated into religion and ritual behavior. In the north, as soon as a youth shows the fatal signs, he or she is captured and handed over to the tribal elders. With rituals similar to their funeral rites, they fasten heavy stones to the victim's hands and feet, then go in procession to a cliff high above the sea and push the victim over, shouting,

"Fly! Fly for us!"

Among the steppe tribes, the wings are allowed to develop completely, and the youth is carefully, worshipfully attended all that year. Let us say that it is a girl who has shown the fatal symptoms. In her feverish trances she functions as a shaman and soothsayer. The priests listen and interpret all her sayings to the people. When her wings are full grown, they are bound down to her back. Then the whole tribe set out to walk with her to the nearest high place, cliff or crag—often a journey of weeks in that flat, desolate country.

On the heights, after days of dancing and imbibing hallucinatory smoke from smudge fires of byubyu wood, the priests go with the young woman, all of them drugged, dancing and singing, to the edge of the cliff. There her wings are freed. She lifts them for the first time, and then like a young falcon leaving the nest, leaps stumbling off the cliff into the air, wildly beating those huge, untried wings. Whether she flies or falls, all the men of the tribe, screaming with excitement, shoot at her with bow and arrow or throw their razor-pointed hunting spears. She falls, pierced by dozens of spears and arrows. The women scramble down the cliff, and if there is any life left in her, they beat it out with stones. They then throw and heap stones over the body till it is buried under a cairn.

There are many cairns at the foot of every steep hill or crag in all the steppe country. Ancient cairns furnish stones for the new ones. Such young people may try to escape their fate by running away from their people, but the weakness and fever that attend the development of wings cripple them, and they never get far.

There is a folktale in the South Marches of Merm of a winged man who leapt up into the air from the sacrificial crag and flew so strongly that he escaped the spears and arrows and disappeared into the sky. The original story ends there. The playwright Norwer used it as the basis of a omantic tragedy. In his play Transgression, the young man has appointed a tryst with his beloved and flies there to meet with her; but she has unwittingly betrayed him to another suitor, who lies in wait. As the lovers embrace, the suitor hurls his spear and kills the winged one. The maiden pulls out her own knife and kills the murderer and then—after exchanging anguished farewells with the not quite expired winged one—stabs herself. It is melodramatic but, if well staged, very moving; everybody has tears in their eyes when the hero first descends like an eagle, and when, dying, he enfolds his beloved in his great bronze wings.

A version of Transgression was performed a few years ago on my plane, in Chicago, at the Actual Reality Theater. It was probably inevitably, but unfortunately, translated as Sacrifice of the Angels. There is absolutely no mythology or lore concerning anything like our angels among the Gyr. Sentimental pictures of sweet little cherubs with baby wings, hovering guardian spirits, or grander images of divine messengers would strike them as a hideous mockery of something every parent and every adolescent dreads: a rare but fearful deformity, a curse, a death sentence. Among the urbanised Gyr, that dread is mitigated to some degree, since the winged ones are treated not as sacrificial scapegoats but with tolerance and even sympathy, as people with a most unfortunate handicap.

We may find this odd. To soar over the heads of the earth-bound, to race with eagles and soar with condors, to dance on air, to ride the wind, not in a noisy metal box or on a contraption of plastic and fabric and straps but on one's own vast, strong, splendid, outstretched wings—how could that be anything but a joy, a freedom? How stodgy, sullen-hearted, leaden-souled the Gyr must be, to think that people who can fly are cripples!

But they do have their reasons. The fact is that the winged Gyr can't trust their wings.

No fault can be found in the actual design of the wings. They serve admirably, with a little practice, for short flights, for effortless gliding and soaring on updrafts and, with more practice, for stunts and tumbling, aerial acrobatics. When winged people are fully mature, if they fly regularly they may achieve great stamina. They can stay aloft almost indefinitely. Many learn to sleep on the wing. Flights of over two thousand miles have been recorded, with only brief hover-stops to eat. Most of these very long flights were made by women, whose lighter bodies and bone structure give them the advantage over distance. Men, with their more powerful musculature, would take the speed-flying awards, if there were any. But the Gyr, at least the wingless majority, are not interested in records or awards, certainly not in competitions that involve a high risk of death.

The problem is that fliers' wings are liable to sudden, total, disastrous failure. Flight engineers and medical investigators on Gyr and elsewhere have not been able to account for it. The design of the wings has no detectable fault; their failure must be caused by an as yet unidentified physical or psychological factor, an incompatibility of the alar processes with the rest of the body. Unfortunately no weakness shows up beforehand; there is no way to predict wing failure. It occurs without warning. A flier who has flown his entire adult life without a shadow of trouble takes off one morning and, having attained altitude, suddenly, appallingly, finds his wings will not obey him—they are shuddering, closing, clapping down along his sides, paralysed. And he falls from the sky like a stone.

The medical literature states that as many as one flight in twenty ends in failure. Fliers I talked to believe that wing failure is not nearly as frequent as that, citing cases of people who have flown daily for decades. But it is not a matter they want to talk about with me, or perhaps even with one another. They seem to have no preventive precautions or rituals, accepting it as truly random. Failure may come on the first flight or the thousandth. No cause has been found for it—heredity, age, inexperience, fatigue, diet, emotion, physical condition. Every time a flier goes up, the chance of wing failure is the same.

Some survive the fall. But they never fall again, because they can never fly again. Once the wings have failed, they are useless. They remain paralysed, dragging along beside and behind their owner like a huge, heavy feather cape.

Foreigners ask why fliers don't carry parachutes in case of wing failure. No doubt they could. It is a question of temperament. Winged people who fly are those willing to take the risk of wing failure. Those who do not want the risk, do not fly. Or perhaps those who consider it a risk do not fly, and those who fly do not consider it a risk.

As amputation of the wings is invariably fatal, and surgical removal of any part of them causes acute, incurable, crippling pain, the fallen fliers and those who choose not to fly must drag their wings about all their lives, through the streets, up and down the stairs. Their changed bone structure is not well suited to ground life. They tire easily walking and suffer many fractures and muscular injuries. Few nonflying fliers live to sixty. Those who do fly face their death every time they take off. Some of them, however, are still alive and still flying at eighty. It is a quite wonderful sight, takeoff. Human beings aren't as awkward as I would have expected, having seen the graceless flapping of such masters of the air as pelicans and swans getting airborne. Of course it is easiest to launch from a perch or height, but if there's no such convenience handy, all they need is a run of twenty or twenty-five meters, enough for a couple of lifts and downbeats of the great extended wings, and then a step that doesn't touch the ground, and then they're up, aloft, soaring—maybe circling back overhead to smile and wave down at uplifted faces before arrowing off above the roofs or over the hills. They fly with the legs close together, the body arched a little backward, the leg feathers fanning out into a hawklike tail as needed. As the arms have no integral muscular connection to the wings—winged Gyr are six-limbed creatures—the hands ' may be kept down along the sides to reduce air resistance and increase speed. In a leisurely flight, they may do anything hands do—scratch the head, peel a fruit, sketch an aerial view of the landscape, hold a baby. Though the last I saw only once, and it troubled me.

I talked several times with a winged Gyr named Ardiadia; what follows is all in his own words, recorded, with his permission, during our conversations.

OH, YES, WHEN I FIRST found out—when it started happening to me, you know—I was floored. Terrified! I couldn't believe it. I'd been so sure it wouldn't happen to me. When we were kids, you know, we used to joke about so-and-so being "flighty," or say, "He'll be taking off one of these days." But me? Me grow wings? It wasn't going to happen to me. So when I got this headache, and then my teeth ached for a while, and then my back began to hurt, I kept telling myself it was a toothache, I had an infection, an abscess... But when it really began, there was no more fooling myself. It was terrible. I really can't remember much about it. It was bad. It hurt. First like knives running back and forth between my shoulders, and claws digging up and down my spine. And then all over, my arms, my legs, my fingers, my face... And I was so weak I couldn't stand up. I got out of bed and fell down on the floor and I couldn't get up. I lay there calling my mother, "Mama! Mama, please come!" She was asleep. She worked late, waiting in a restaurant, and didn't get home till way after midnight, and so she slept hard. And I could feel the floor getting hot underneath me, I was so hot with fever, and I'd try to move my face to a cooler place on the floor...

Well, I don't know if the pain eased off or I just got used to it, but it was a bit better after a couple of months. It was hard, though. And long, and dull, and strange. Lying there. But not on my back. You can't lie on your back, ever, you know. Hard to sleep at night. When it hurt, it always hurt most at night. Always a little fevery, thinking strange thoughts, having funny ideas. And never able to think a thought through, never able quite to hold on to an idea. I felt as if I myself really couldn't think any more. Thoughts just came into me and went through me and I watched them. And no plans for the future any more because what was my future now?

I'd thought of being a schoolteacher. My mother had been so excited about that, she'd encouraged me to stay in school the extra year, to qualify for teachers' college... Well. I had my nineteenth birthday lying there in my little room in our three-room flat over the grocery on Lacemakers Lane. My mother brought some fancy food from the restaurant and a bottle of honey wine, and we tried to have a celebration, but I couldn't drink the wine, and she couldn't eat because she was crying. But I could eat, I was always starving hungry, and that cheered her up... Poor Mama!

Well, so, I came out of that, little by little, and the wings grew in, great ugly dangling naked things, disgusting, to start with, and even worse when they started to fledge, with the pin-feathers like great pimples. But when the primaries and secondaries came out, and I began to feel the muscles there, and to be able to shudder my wings, shake them, raise them a little— and I wasn't feverish any more, or I'd got used to running a fever all the time, I'm not really sure which it is—and I was able to get up and walk around, and feel how light my body was now, as if gravity couldn't affect me, even with the weight of those huge wings dragging after me... but I could lift them, get them up off the floor...

Not myself, though. I was earthbound. My body felt light, but I wore out even trying to walk, got weak and shaky. I used to be pretty good at the broad jump, but now I couldn't get both feet off the ground at once. I was feeling a lot better, but it bothered me to be so weak, and I felt closed in. Trapped. Then a flier came by, a man from uptown, who'd heard about me. Fliers look after kids going through the change. He'd looked in a couple of times to reassure my mother and make sure I was doing all right. I was grateful for that. Now he came and talked to me for a long time, and showed me the exercises I could do. And I did them, every day, all the time—hours and hours. What else did I have to do? I used to like reading, but it didn't seem to hold my attention any more. I used to like going to the theater, but I couldn't do that, I still wasn't strong enough. And places like theaters, they don't have room for people with unbound wings. You take up too much space, you cause a fuss. I'd been good at mathematics in school, but I couldn't fix my attention on the problems any more. They didn't seem to matter. So I had nothing to do but the exercises the flier taught me. And I did them. All the time. The exercises helped. There really wasn't enough room even in our sitting room, I never could do a vertical stretch fully, but I did what I could. I felt better, I got stronger. I finally began to feel like my wings were mine. Were part of me. Or I was part of them.

Then one day I couldn't stand being inside any more. Thirteen months I'd been inside, in those three little rooms, most ofihem just in the one room, thirteen months! Mama was out at work. I went downstairs. I walked the first ten steps down and then I lifted my wings. Even though the staircase was way too narrow, I could lift them some, and I stepped off and floated down the last six steps. Well, sort of. I hit pretty hard at the bottom, and my knees buckled, but I didn't really fall. It wasn't flying, but it wasn't quite falling.

I went outside. The air was wonderful. I felt like I hadn't had any air for a year. Actually, I felt like I'd never known what air was in my whole life. Even in that narrow little street, with the houses hanging over it, there was wind, there was the sky, not a ceiling. The sky overhead. The air. I started walking. I hadn't planned anything. I wanted to get out of the lanes and alleys, to somewhere open, a big plaza or square or park, anything open to the sky. I saw people staring at me but I didn't care. I'd stared at people with wings, when I didn't have them. Not meaning anything, just curious. Wings aren't all that common. I used to wonder a little about what it felt like to have them, you know. Just ignorance. So I didn't care if people looked at me now. I was too eager to get out from under the roofs. My legs were weak and shaky but they kept going, and sometimes, where the street wasn't crowded with people, I'd lift my wings a little, loft them, get a feel of the air under the feathers, and for a little I'd be lighter on my feet.

So I got to the Fruit Market. The market had shut down, it was evening, the booths were all shoved back, so there was a big space in the middle, cobblestones. I stood there under the Assay Office for a while doing exercises, lifts and stretches—I could do a vertical all the way for the first time, and it felt wonderful. Then I began to trot a little as I lofted, and my feet would get off the ground for a moment, and so I couldn't resist, I couldn't help it, I began to run and to loft my wings, and then beat down, and loft again, and I was up! But there was the Weights and Measures Building right in front of me, this grey stone facade right in my face, and I actually had to fend off, push myself away from it with my hands, and drop down to the pavement. But I turned around and there I had the full run ahead of me, clear across the marketplace to the Assay Office. And I ran, and I took off.

I swooped around the marketplace for a while, staying low, learning how to turn and bank, and how to use my tail feathers. It comes pretty natural, you feel what to do, the air tells you... but the people down below were looking up, and ducking when I banked too steep, or stalled... I didn't care. I flew for over an hour, till after dark, after all the people had gone. I'd got way up over the roofs by then. But I realised my wing muscles were getting tired and I'd better come down. That was hard. I mean, landing was hard because I didn't know how to land. I came down like a sack of rocks, bam! Nearly sprained my ankle, and the soles of my feet stung like fire. If anybody saw it they must have laughed. But I didn't care. It was just hard to be on the ground. I hated being down. Limping home, dragging my wings that weren't any good here, feeling weak, feeling heavy. It took me quite a while to get home, and Mama came in just a little after me. She looked at me and said, "You've been out," and I said, "I flew, Mama," and she burst into tears.

I wfts sorry for her but there wasn't much I could say. She didn't even ask me if I was going to go on flying. She knew I would. I don't understand the people who have wings and don't use them. I suppose they're interested in having a career. Maybe they were already in love with somebody on the ground. But it seems... I don't know. I can't really understand it. Wanting to stay down. Choosing not to fly. Wingless people can't help it, it's not their fault they're grounded. But if you have wings ...

Of course they may be afraid of wing failure. Wing failure doesn't happen if you don't fly. How can it? How can something fail that never worked?

I suppose being safe is important to some people. They have a family or commitments or a job or something. I don't know. You'd have to talk to one of them. I'm a flier.

I ASKED ARDIADIA how he made his living. Like many fliers, he worked part-time for the postal service. He mostly carried government correspondence and dispatches on long flights, even overseas. Evidently he was considered a gifted and reliable employee. For particularly important dispatches, he told me that two fliers were always sent, in case one suffered wing failure.

He was thirty-two. I asked him if he was married, and he told me that fliers never married; they considered it, he said, beneath them. "Affairs on the wing," he said, with a slight smile. I asked if the affairs were always with other fliers, and he said, "Oh, yes, of course," unintentionally revealing his surprise or disgust at the idea of making love to a nonflier. His manners were pleasant and civil, he was most obliging, but he could not quite hide his sense of being apart from, different from the wingless, having nothing really to do with them. How could he help but look down on us?

I pressed him a little about this feeling of superiority, and he tried to explain. "When I said it was as if I was my wings, you know?—that's it. Being able to fly makes other things seem uninteresting. What people do seems so trivial. Flying is complete. It's enough. I don't know if you can understand. It's one's whole body, one's whole self, up in the whole sky. On a clear day, in the sunlight, with everything lying down there below, far away... Or in a high wind, in a storm—out over the sea, that's where I like best to fly. Over the sea in stormy weather. When the fishing boats run for land, and you have it all to yourself, the sky full of rain and lightning, and the clouds under your wings. Once offEmer Cape I danced with the waterspouts... It takes everything to fly. Everything you are, everything you have. And so if you go down, you go down whole. And over the sea, if you go down, that's it, who's to know, who cares? I don't want to be buried in the ground." The idea made him shiver a little. I could see the shudder in his long, heavy, bronze-and-black wing feathers.

I asked if the affairs on the wing sometimes resulted in children, and he said with indifference that of course they did. I pressed him a little about it, and he said that a baby was a great bother to a flying mother, so that as soon as it was weaned it was usually left "on the ground," as he put it, to be brought up by relatives. Sometimes the winged mother got so attached to the childjthat she grounded herself to look after it. He told me this with some disdain.

The children of fliers are no more likely to grow wings than other children. The phenomenon has no genetic factor but is a developmental pathology shared by all Gyr, which appears in less than one out of a thousand.

I think Ardiadia would not accept the word pathology.

I talked also with a nonflying winged Gyr, who let me record our conversation but asked that I not use his name. He is a member of a respectable law firm in a small city in Central Gy.

He said, "I never flew, no. I was twenty when I got sick. I'd thought I was past the age, safe. It was a terrible blow. My parents had already spent a good deal of money, made sacrifices to get me into college. I was doing well in college. I liked learning. I had an intellect. To lose a year was bad enough. I wasn't going to let this business eat up my whole life. To me the wings are simply excrescences. Growths. Impediments to walking, dancing, sitting in a civilised manner on a normal chair, wearing decent clothing. I refused to let something like that get in the way of my education, my life. Fliers are stupid, their brains go all to feathers. I wasn't going to trade in my mind for a chance to flitter about over rooftops. I'm more interested in what goes on under the roofs. I don't care for scenery. I prefer people. And I wanted a normal life. I wanted to marry, to have children. My father was a kind man; he died when I was sixteen, and I'd always thought that if I could be as good to my children as he was to us, it would be a way of thanking him, of honoring his memory ... I was fortunate enough to meet a beautiful woman who refused to let my handicap frighten her. In fact she won't let me call it that. She insists that all this"—he indicated his wings with a slight gesture of his head—"was what she first saw in me. Claims that when we first met, she thought I was quite a boring, stuffy young fellow, till I turned around." His head feathers were black with a blue crest. His wings, though flattened, bound, and belted down, as nonfliers' wings always are, to keep them out of the way and as unnoticeable as possible, were splendidly feathered in patterns of dark blue and peacock blue with black bars and edges.

"At any rate, I was determined to keep my feet on the ground, in every sense. If I'd ever had any youthful notions about flitting off for a while, which I really never did, once I was through with the fever and delirium and had made peace with the whole painful, wasteful process—if I had ever thought of flying, once I was married, once we had a child, nothing, nothing could induce me to yearn for even a taste ofthat life, to consider it even for a moment. The utter irresponsibility of it, the arrogance—the arrogance of it is very distasteful to me."

We then talked for some time about his law practice, which was an admirable one, devoted to representing poor people against swindlers and profiteers. He showed me a charming portrait of his two children, eleven and nine years old, which he had drawn with one of his own quills. The chances that either child would grow wings was, as for every Gyr, a thousand to one.

Shortly before I left, I asked him, "Do you ever dream of flying?" Lawyerlike, he was slow to answer. He looked away, out the window.

"Doesn't everyone?" he said.

THE ISLAND OF THE IMMORTALS

SOMEBODY ASKED ME if I'd heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them. The travel agent rather reluctantly showed me on her map a place called the Island of the Immortals. "You don't want to go there," she said.

"I don't?"

"Well, it's dangerous," she said, looking at me as if she thought I was not the danger-loving type, in which she was entirely correct. She was a rather unpolished local agent, not an employee of the Interplanary Service. Yendi is not a popular destination. In many ways it's so like our own plane that it seems hardly worth the trouble of visiting. There are differences, but they're subtle.

"Why is it called the Island of the Immortals?"

"Because some of the people there are immortal."

"They don't die?" I asked, never quite sure of the accuracy of my translatomat.

"They don't die," she said indifferently. "Now, the Prinjo Archipelago is a lovely place for a restful fortnight." Her pencil moved southward across the map of the Great Sea of Yendi. My gaze remained on the large, lonely Island of the Immortals. I pointed to it.

"Is there a hotel—there?"

"There are no tourist facilities. Just cabins for the diamond hunters."

"There are diamond mines?"

"Probably," she said. She had become dismissive.

"What makes it dangerous?"

"The flies."

"Biting flies? Do they carry disease?"

"No." She was downright sullen by now.

"I'd like to try it for a few days," I said, as winningly as I could. "Just to find out if I'm brave. If I get scared, I'll come right back. Give me an open flight back."

"No airport."

"Ah," said I, more winningly than ever. "So how would I get there?"

"Ship," she said, unwon. "Once a week." Nothing rouses an attitude like an attitude. "Fine!" I said. At least, I thought as I left the travel agency, it won't be anything like Laputa. I had read Gulliver's Travels as a child, in a slightly abridged and probably greatly expurgated version. My memory of it was like all my childhood memories, immediate, broken, vivid—bits of bright particularity in a vast drift of oblivion. I remembered that Laputa floated in the air, so you had to use an airship to get to it. And really I remembered little else, except that the Laputans were immortal, and that I had liked it the least of Gulliver's four travels, deciding it was for grown-ups, a damning quality at the time. Did the Laputans have spots, moles, something like that, which distinguished them? And were they scholars? But they grew senile, and lived on and on in incontinent idiocy—or did I imagine that? There was something nasty about them, something like that, something for grown-ups.

But I was on Yendi, where Swift's works were not in the library. I could not look it up. Instead, since I had a whole day before the ship sailed, I went to the library and looked up the Island of the Immortals. The Central Library of Undund is a noble old building füll of modern conveniences, including legemats. I asked a librarian for assistance and he brought me Postwand's Explorations, written about a hundred and sixty years earlier, from which I copied what follows. At the time Postwand wrote, the port city where I was staying, An Ria, had not been founded; the great wave of settlers from the east had not begun; the peoples of the coast were scattered tribes of shepherds and farmers. Postwand took a rather patronising but intelligent interest in their stories.

"Among the legends of the peoples of the West Coast," he writes, "one concerned a large island two or three days west from Undund Bay, where live the people who never die. All whom I asked about it were familiar with the reputation of the Island of the Immortals, and some even told me that members of their tribe had visited the place. Impressed with the unanimity of this tale, I determined to test its veracity. When at length Vong had finished making repairs to my boat, I sailed out of the Bay and due west over the Great Sea. A following wind favored my expedition.

"About noon on the fifth day, I raised the island. Low-lying, it appeared to be at least fifty miles long from north to south.

"In the region in which I first brought the boat close to the land, the shores were entirely salt marsh. It being low tide, and the weather unbearably sultry, the putrid smell of the mud kept us well away, until at length sighting sand beaches, I sailed into a shallow bay and soon saw the roofs of a small town at the mouth of a creek. We tied up at a crude and decrepit jetty and with indescribable emotion, on my part at least, set foot on this isle reputed to hold the secret of ETERNAL LIFE." I think I shall abbreviate Postwand; he's long-winded, and besides, he's always sneering at Vong, who seems to do most of the work and have none of the indescribable emotions. So he and Vong trudged around the town, finding it all very shabby and nothing out of the ordinary, except that there were dreadful swarms of flies. Everyone went about in gauze clothing from head to toe, and all the doors and windows had screens. Postwand assumed the flies would bite savagely, but found they didn't; they were annoying, he says, but one scarcely felt their bites, which didn't swell up or itch. He wondered if they carried some disease. He asked the islanders, who disclaimed all knowledge of disease, saying nobody ever got sick except mainlanders.

At this, Postwand got excited, naturally, and asked them if they ever died. "Of course," they said.

He does not say what else they said, but one gathers they treated him as yet another idiot from the mainland asking stupid questions. He becomes quite testy, and makes comments on their backwardness, bad manners, and execrable cookery. After a disagreeable night in a hut of some kind, he explored inland for several miles, on foot since there was no other way to get about. In a tiny village near a marsh he saw a sight that was, in his words, "proof positive that the islanders' claim of being free from disease was mere boastfulness, or something yet more sinister: for a more dreadful example of the ravages of udreba I have never seen, even in the wilds of Rotogo. The sex of the poor victim was indistinguishable; of the legs, nothing remained but stumps; the whole body was as if it had been melted in fire; only the hair, which was quite white, grew luxuriantly, long, tangled, and filthy—a crowning horror to this sad spectacle." I looked up udreba. It's a disease the Yendians dread as we dread lerjrosy, which it resembles, though it is far more immediately dangerous; a single contact with saliva or any exudation can cause infection. There is no vaccine and no cure. Postwand was horrified to see children playing close by the udreb. He apparently lectured a woman of the village on hygiene, at which she took offense and lectured him back, telling him not to stare at people. She picked up the poor udreb "as if it were a child of five," he says, and took it into her hut. She came out with a bowl full of something, muttering loudly. At this point Vong, with whom I sympathise, suggested that it was time to leave. "I acceded to my companion's groundless apprehensions," Post-wand says. They sailed away that evening.

I can't say that this account raised my enthusiasm for visiting the island. I sought some more modern information. My librarian had drifted off, the way Yendians always seemed to do. I didn't know how to use the subject catalogue, or it was even more incomprehensibly organised than our electronic subject catalogues, or there was singularly little information concerning the Island of the Immortals in the library. All I found was a treatise entitled the Diamonds of Aya—a name sometimes given the island. The article was too technical for the legemat; it kept leaving blanks. I couldn't understand much except that apparently there were no mines; the diamonds did not occur deep in the earth but were to be found lying on the surface of it—as I think is the case in a southern African desert on my plane. As the island of Aya was forested and swampy, its diamonds were exposed by heavy rains or mud slides in the wet season. People went and wandered around looking for them. A big one turned up just often enough to keep people coming. The islanders apparently never joined in the search. In fact, some baffled diamond hunters claimed that the natives buried diamonds when they found them. If I understood the treatise, some that had been found were immense by our standards: they were described as lumps, usually black or dark, occasionally clear, and weighing up to five pounds. Nothing was said about cutting these huge stones, what they were used for, or their market price. Evidently the Yendians didn't prize diamonds as we do. There was a lifeless, almost furtive tone to the treatise, as if it concerned something vaguely shameful. Surely if the islanders knew anything about "the secret of ETERNAL

LIFE," there'd be a bit more about them, and it, in the library?

It was mere stubbornness, or reluctance to go back to the sullen travel agent and admit my mistake, that impelled me to the docks the next morning.

I cheered up no end when I saw my ship, a charming mini-liner with about thirty pleasant staterooms. Its fortnightly round took it to several islands farther west than Aya. Its sister ship, stopping by on the homeward leg, would bring me back to the mainland at the end of my week. Or perhaps I would simply stay aboard and have a two-week cruise?

That was fine with the ship's staff. They were informal, even lackadaisical, about arrangements. I had the impression that low energy and a short attention span were quite common among Yendians. But my companions on the ship were undemanding, and the cold fish salads were excellent. I spent two days on the top deck washing seabirds swoop, great red fish leap, and translucent vanewings hover over the sea.

We sighted Aya very early in the morning of the third day. At the mouth of the bay the smell of the marshes was truly discouraging; but a conversation with the ship's captain had decided me to visit Aya after all, and I disembarked.

The captain, a man of sixty or so, had assured me that there were indeed immortals on the island. They were not born immortal but contracted immortality from the bite of the island flies. It was, he thought, a virus. "You'll want to take precautions," he said. "It's rare. I don't think there's been a new case in the last hundred years—longer, maybe. But you don't want to take chances."

After pondering a while I inquired, as delicately as possible, though delicacy is hard to achieve on the translatomat, whether there weren't people who wanted to escape death-people who came to the island hoping to be bitten by one of these lively flies. Was there a drawback I did not know about, some price too high to pay even for immortality?

The captain considered my question. He was slow-spoken, unexcitable, verging on the lugubrious. "I think so," he said. He looked at me. "You can judge," he said. "After you've been there." He would say no more. A ship's captain is a person who has that privilege.

The ship did not put into the bay, but was met out beyond the bar by a boat that took passengers ashore. The other passengers were still in their cabins. Nobody but the captain and a couple of sailors watched me (all rigged out head to foot in a suit of strong but gauzy mesh which I had rented from the ship) clamber down into the boat and wave good-bye. The captain nodded. One of the sailors waved. I was frightened. It was no help at all that I didn't know what I was frightened of.

Putting the captain and Postwand together, it sounded as if the price of immortality was the horrible disease udreba. But I really had very little evidence, and my curiosity was intense. If a virus that made you immortal turned up in my country, vast sums of money would be poured into studying it, and if it had bad effects, scientists would alter it genetically to get rid of them, and the talk shows would yatter on about it, and news anchors would pontificate about it, and the Pope would do some pontificating too, and so would all the other holy men, and meanwhile the very rich would be cornering not only the market but the supplies. And then the very rich would be even more different from you and me. I was curious why none of this had happened. The Yendi-ans were apparently so uninterested in their chance to be immortal that there was scarcely anything about it in the library.

But I could see, as the boat drew close to the town, that the travel agent had been a bit disingenuous. There had been hotels here—a couple of big ones, four stories. They were all visibly derelict, signs askew, windows boarded or blank.

The boatman, a shy young man, rather nice-looking as well as I could tell through his gauze envelope, said, "Hunters' lodge, ma'am?" into my translatomat. I nodded and he sailed us neatly to a small jetty at the north end of the docks. The waterfront too had seen better days. It was now sagging and forlorn, no ships, only a couple of trawlers or crabbers. I stepped up onto the dock, looking about nervously for flies; but there were none at the moment. I tipped the boatman a couple of radio, and he was so grateful he took me up the street, a sad little street, to the diamond hunters' lodge. It consisted of eight or nine decrepit cabins managed by a dispirited woman who, speaking slowly but without any commas or periods, said to take number 4 because the screens were the best ones breakfast at eight dinner at seven eighteen radio and did I want a lunch packed a radio fifty extra.

All the other cabins were unoccupied. The toilet had a little, internal, eternal leak, link... tink, which I could not find the source of. Dinner and breakfast arrived on trays, and were edible. The flies arrived with the heat of the day, plenty of them, but not the thick fearsome swarms I had expected. The screens kept them out, and the gauze suit kept them from biting. They were small, weak-looking, brownish flies. That day and the next morning, walking about the town, the name of which I could not find written anywhere, I felt that the Yendian tendency to depression had bottomed out here, attained nadir. The islanders were a sad people. They were listless. They were lifeless. My mind turned up that word and stared at it.

I realised I'd waste my whole week just getting depressed if I didn't rouse up my courage and ask some questions. I saw my young boatman fishing off the jetty and went to talk to him.

"Will you tell me about the immortals?" I asked him, after some halting amenities.

"Well, most people just walk around and look for them. In the woods," he said.

"No, not the diamonds," I said, checking the translatomat. "I'm not really very interested in diamonds."

"Nobody much is any more," he said. "There used to be a lot of tourists and diamond hunters. I guess they do something else now."

"But I read in a book that there are people here who live very, very long lives—who actually don't die."

"Yes," he said, placidly.

"Are there any immortal people in town? Do you know any of them?" He checked his fishing line. "Well, no," he said. "There was a new one, way back in my grandpa's time, but it went to the mainland. It was a woman. I guess there's an old one in the village." He nodded towards the inland. "Mother saw it once."

"If you could, would you like to live a long time?"

"Sure!" he said, with as much enthusiasm as a Yendian is capable of.

"You know."

"But you don't want to be immortal. You wear the fly gauze." He nodded. He saw nothing to discuss, in all this. He was fishing with gauze gloves, seeing the world through a mesh veil. That was life. The storekeeper told me that you could walk to the village in a day and showed me the path. My dispirited landlady packed me a lunch. I set out next morning, attended at first by thin, persistent swarms of flies. It was a dull walk across a low, dafnp landscape, but the sun was mild and pleasant, and the flies finally gave up. To my surprise, I got to the village before I was even hungry for lunch. The islanders must walk slowly and seldom. It had to be the right village, though, because they spoke only of one, "the village," again no name.

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

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

I stopped, appalled.

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

"You came to see the Immortal," she said.

I nodded.

"Two radio fifty," she said.

I got out the money and handed it to her.

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

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

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

After a while I said, "It can't die."

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

"You aren't wearing gauze," I said, suddenly realising this. "The children weren't. Aren't you—"

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

"You mean there's only one immortal at a time?"

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

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

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

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

"No," I said, and I have to admit that I burst into tears. She came closer and patted my shoulder. "It is very, very sad," she said. She smiled again.

"But the children like to feed it," she said. "And the money helps."

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

We are a carbon-based life-form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering. Perhaps "diamond" is only a name the Yendians give these lumps of ruin, a kind of euphemism.

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

I'VE HEARS OF PLANES where no one should go, planes no one should visit even briefly. Sometimes in the dreary bustle of airport bars men at the next table talk in low voices, saying things like, "I told him what the Gnegn did to MacDowell," or, "He thought he could handle it on Vavizzua." Then a harsh, shrill, enormously amplified voice blats out,

"Flight onteen to Hhuhh is now boarding at gate throighty-six," or,

"Shimbleglood Rrggrrggrr to a white courtesy phone please," drowning out all other voices and driving sleep and hope from the poor souls who droop across blue plastic seats with steel legs bolted to the floor trying to catch a little rest between planes; and the words of the men at the next table are lost. Of course the men may merely be boasting to increase the glamor of their lives; surely if the Gnegn or Vavizzua were truly dangerous, the Interplanary Agency would warn people to stay away—as they warn them to stay off Zuehe.

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting out a missed connection in the Denver airport, I fell into conversation with a friendly couple who'd been to Uñi. They told me it was

"a nice place." As they were elderly, he laden with an expensive camcorder and other electronic impediments, she wearing pantyhose and deeply unadventurous white wedgie sandals, I thought they wouldn't have said that about anywhere dangerous. That was stupid of me. I should have been warned by the fact that they weren't good at description. "Lot going on there," the man said. "But all pretty much like here. Not one of those foreign foreign places." The wife added, "It's a storybook country! Just like things you see on TV."

Even that didn't alert me.

"The weather's very nice," the wife said. The husband amended,

"Changeable."

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

I checked into the Interplanary Inn. WELCOME TO OUR FRIENDS

FROM THE ASTRAL PLANE! said a sign on the desk. A pale, heavyset, redheaded woman behind the desk gave me a translatomat and a self-guiding map of the town, but also pointed out to me the large placard: