“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.”
I did not have to ask how he had voted, but I asked if the Bayderac had been willing to go.
“Some of them argued, some of them threatened,” he said. “They talked about their wars and their weapons. I am sure they could have destroyed us utterly. But they did not. Maybe they despised us so much they didn’t want to bother. Or their wars called them away. By then we had been visited by people from the Interplanary Agency, and most likely it was their doing that the Bayderac left us in peace. Enough of us had been alarmed that we agreed then, in another voting, that we wanted no more visitors. So now the Agency sees to it that they come only to this island. I am not sure we made the right choice, there. Sometimes I think we did, sometimes I wonder. Why are we afraid of other peoples, other Ways? They can’t all be like the Bayderac.”
“I think you made the right choice,” I said. “But I say it against my will. I’d like so much to meet an Ansar woman, to meet your children, to see the Cities under the Sun! I’d like so much to see your dancing!”
“Oh, well, that you can see,” he said, and stood up. Maybe we had had a little more than usual, that night.
He stood very tall there in the glimmering darkness on the veranda over the beach. He straightened his shoulders, and his head went back. The crest on his head slowly rose into a stiff plume, silver in the starlight. He lifted his arms above his head.
It was the pose of the antique Spanish dancer, fiercely elegant, tense, and masculine. He did not leap, he was after all a man of eighty, but he gave somehow the impression of a leap, then a deep graceful bow. His beak clicked out a quick double rhythm, he stamped twice, and his feet seemed to flicker in a complex set of steps while his upper body remained taut and straight. Then his arms came out in a great embracing gesture, towards me, as I sat almost terrified by the beauty and intensity of his dance.
And then he stopped, and laughed. He was out of breath. He sat down and passed his hand over his forehead and his crest, panting a little. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t courting season.”
SOCIAL DREAMING OF THE FRIN
Note: much of the information for this piece comes from An Oneirological Survey on the Frinthian Plane, published by Mills College Press, and from conversations with Frinthian scholars and friends.
ON THE FRINTHIAN PLANE, dreams are not private property. A troubled Frin has no need to lie on a couch recounting dreams to a psychoanalyst, for the doctor already knows what the patient dreamed last night, because the doctor dreamed it too; and the patient also dreamed what the doctor dreamed; and so did everyone else in the neighborhood.
To escape from the dreams of others or to have a private, a secret dream, the Frin must go out alone into the wilderness. And even in the wilderness, their sleep may be invaded by the strange dream visions of lions, antelope, bears, or mice.
While awake, and during much of their sleep, the Frin are as dream-deaf as we are. Only sleepers who are in or approaching REM sleep can participate in the dreams of others also in REM sleep.
REM is an acronym for “rapid eye movement,” a visible accompaniment of this stage of sleep; its signal in the brain is a characteristic type of electroencephalic wave. Most of our rememberable dreams occur during REM sleep.
Frinthian REM sleep and that of people on our plane yield very similar EEG traces, though there are some significant differences, in which may lie the key to the Frinthian ability to share dreams.
To share, the dreamers must be fairly close to one another. The carrying power of the average Frinthian dream is about that of the average human voice. A dream can be received easily within a hundred-meter radius, and bits and fragments of it may carry a good deal farther. A strong dream in a solitary place may well carry for two kilometers or even farther.
In a lonely farmhouse a Frin’s dreams mingle only with those of the rest of the family, along with echoes, whiffs, and glimpses of what the cattle in the barn and the dog dozing on the doorstop hear, smell, and see in their sleep.
In a village or town, with people asleep in all the houses around, the Frin spend at least part of every night in a shifting phantasmagoria of their own and other people’s dreams which I find hard to imagine.
I asked an acquaintance in a small town to tell me any dreams she could recall from the past night. At first she demurred, saying that they’d all been nonsense, and only “strong” dreams ought to be thought about and talked over. She was evidently reluctant to tell me, an outsider, things that had been going on in her neighbors’ heads. I managed at last to convince her that my interest was genuine and not voyeuristic. She thought a while and said, “Well, there was a woman—it was me in the dream, or sort of me, but I think it was the mayor’s wife’s dream, actually, they live at the corner—this woman, anyhow, and she was trying to find a baby that she’d had last year. She had put the baby into a dresser drawer and forgotten all about it, and now I was, she was, feeling worried about it—Had it had anything to eat? Since last year? Oh my word, how stupid we are in dreams! And then, oh, yes, then there was an awful argument between a naked man and a dwarf, they were in an empty cistern. That may have been my own dream, at least to start with. Because I know that cistern. It was on my grandfather’s farm where I used to stay when I was a child. But they both turned into lizards, I think. And then—oh yes!” She laughed. “I was being squashed by a pair of giant breasts, huge ones, with pointy nipples. I think that was the teenage boy next door, because I was terrified but kind of ecstatic, too. And what else was there? Oh, a mouse, it looked so delicious, and it didn’t know I was there, and I was just about to pounce, but then there was a horrible thing, a nightmare—a face without any eyes—and huge, hairy hands groping at me—and then I heard the three-year-old next door screaming, because I woke up too. That poor child has so many nightmares, she drives us all crazy. Oh, I don’t really like thinking about that one. I’m glad we forget most dreams. Wouldn’t it be awful if we had to remember them all!”