Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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 Alon 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 Alon.

  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 Alon, 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 Alon that flows, clear again, though cowless and troutless, 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 trademarked 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 Noel City, Yuleville, and O Little Town are rimed with frost, the sills heaped with eternal snow, the frames garlanded with fir and holly. Bel
ls 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 of that 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, but flocks 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 the 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, w
aiting 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 Reenactment 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.