Changing Planes

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

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

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

“Women went down from the homesteads and talked to the men,” he said. “They said to listen to them, not only to the Bayderac … Perhaps women don’t feel shame the way men do. Perhaps their shame is different, more a matter of the body than the mind. They didn’t care much for the cars and airplanes and bulldozers but cared a great deal about the medicines that would change us and the rules about who did which kind of work. After all, with us, the woman bears the child, but both parents feed it, both nurture it. Why should a child be left to the mother only? They asked that. How could a woman alone bring up four children? Or more than four children? It was inhuman. And then, in the cities, why should families stay together? The child doesn’t want its parents then, the parents don’t want the child, they all have other things to do… The women talked about this to us men, and with them we tried to talk about it to the Bayderac.

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

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

“Men working on the highway began throwing down their tools and abandoning the big machines the Bayderac had provided. They said, ’What do we need this highway for when we have a thousand ways of our own?’ And they set off southward on those old paths and trails.

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

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