Changing Planes

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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 mü 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 mü 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 u no a dde mü 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 seem
ed 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 of that 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 Thomas Atall, 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 unaggressive, 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 p
ests 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.