Changing Planes

FEELING AT HOME WITH THE HENNEBET

I EXPECT PEOPLE WHO don’t look like me not to be like me, a reasonable expectation, as expectations go; but it makes my mind slow to admit that people who look like me may not be like me.

The Hennebet look remarkably like me. That is to say, not only are they the same general shape and size as people on my plane, with fingers and toes and ears and all the other bits we check a baby for, but also they have pallid skin, dark hair, nearsighted eyes of mixed brown and green, and rather short, stocky figures. Their posture is terrible. The young ones are bright and agile, the old ones are thoughtful and forgetful. An unadventurous and timid people, fond of landscape and inclined to run away from strangers, they are monogamous, hardworking, slightly dyspeptic, and deeply domestic.

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

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

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

“What building was that?” I said.

“Hali tutuve,” she said, placidly threading her needle.

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

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

“Of what?” I asked cautiously.

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

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

I said some conventionality—”What a pity.”

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

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

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

Gathering courage, I asked Mrs. Tattava, “Where is the hali tutuve?”

She did not answer for a while. “Quite far away these days,” she said at last, with a faraway look. Her gaze brightened a little as it returned to me. “Were you there?”

“No.”

“It’s so hard to be sure,” she said. “Do you know I never say I wasn’t anywhere any more, because so often it turns out that I am—or are, as I should say, shouldn’t we? It was very beautiful. Oh, that was so far away! And all along it’s right here now!” She looked at me with such cheer and pleasure that I could not help smiling and feeling happy, though I had not the faintest idea what she was talking about.

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

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

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

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

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

“But why does she have more votes than other people?”

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

“So as you get older… you’re supposed to be wiser?”

He looked uncertain.

“Or they honor the elderly by giving them more votes…?”

“Well, you already have them, you know,” Annup said.

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

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

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

“No,” I said. “I mean, I never did. I don’t understand.”

I brought up the English word transmigration on my translatomat. The Hennebet translation was about birds who fly north in the rainy season and south in the dry season. I brought up reincarnation, and it told me about digestive processes. I brought up my big gun: metempsychosis. The machine told me that there was no word for this “belief” held by many peoples of the other planes that “souls” moved at death into different “bodies.” The translatomat was working in Hennebet, of course, but the words I have put in quotation marks were all in English.

Annup came by while I was engaged in this research. The Hennebet use no large machinery, doing all their digging and building with hand tools, but they long ago borrowed electronic technologies from people on other planes, using them for information storage and communication and voting and so on. Annup adored the translatomat, which was to him a toy, a game. He laughed now. “‘Belief’—that’s thinking so?” he asked. I nodded. “What’s ‘souls’?” he asked.

moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that’s your life, that moment, that’s unnua, that’s all. In a short life I saw my mother’s face, like the sun, so I’m here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I’m unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here,” she repeated, with a comfortable little laugh, and went on with her embroidery.

I have talked to other people about the Hennebet. Some of them are convinced that the Hennebet do literally experience reincarnation, remembering more and more of their previous lives as they grow older, until at death they rejoin an innumerable multitude of former selves, and are then reborn bringing this immaterial trail or train of old lives into a new life.

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

I have no idea what abba is, aside from the plant with pungent little berries.

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