In the same way, the efforts of the Aq to explain or justify their building and their Building all invoke a necessity which doesn’t seem all that necessary and use reasons which meet themselves coming around. We go stone faring because we have always done it. We go to Riqim because the best stone is there. The Building is on the Mediro because the ground’s good and there’s room for it there. The Building is a great undertaking, which our children can look forward to and our men and women can work together on. The stone faring brings people from all our villages together. We were only a poor scattered people in the old days, but now the Building shows that there is a great vision in us.—All these reasons make sense but don’t convince, don’t satisfy.
Perhaps the questions should be asked of those Aq who never have gone stone faring. They don’t question the stone faring. They speak of the stone farers as people doing something brave, difficult, worthy, perhaps sacred. So why have you never gone yourself?—Well, I never felt the need to. People who go, they have to go, they’re called to it.
What about the other people, the Daqo? What do they think about this immense structure, certainly the greatest enterprise and achievement on their world at this time? Very little, evidently. Even the sailors of the stone faring never go up onto the Mediro and know nothing about the Building except that it is there and is very large. Daqo of the northwest continent know it only as rumor, fable, travelers’ tales of the “Palace of the Mediro” on the Great South Continent. Some tales say the King of the Aq lives there in unimaginable splendor; some say that it is a tower taller than the mountains, in which eyeless monsters dwell; others that it is a maze where the unwary traveler is lost in endless corridors foil of bones and ghosts; others that the winds blowing through it moan in huge chords like a vast aeolian harp, which can be heard for hundreds of miles; and so on. To the Daqo it is a legend, like their own legends of the ancient times when their mighty ancestors flew in the air and drank rivers dry and turned forests into stone and built towers taller than the sky, and so on. Fairy tales.
Now and then an Aq who has been stone faring will say something different about the Building. If asked about it, some of them reply: “It is for the Daqo.”
Indeed the Building is better proportioned to the short stature of the Daqo than to the tall Aq. The Daqo, if they ever went there, could walk through the corridors and doorways upright.
An old woman of Katas, who had been five times a stone farer, was the first who gave me that answer.
“The Building is for the Daqo?” I said, taken aback. “But why?”
“Because of the old days.”
“But they never go there.”
“It isn’t finished,” she said.
“A retribution?” I asked, puzzling at it. “A recompense?”
“They need it,” she said.
“The Daqo need it, but you don’t?”
“No,” the old woman said with a smile. “We build it. We don’t need it.”
THE FLIERS OF GY
THE PEOPLE OF GY look pretty much like people from our plane except that they have plumage, not hair. A fine, fuzzy down on the heads of infants becomes a soft, short coat of speckled dun on the fledglings, and with adolescence this grows out into a full head of feathers. Most men have ruffs at the back of the neck, shorter feathers all over the head, and tall, erectile crests. The head plumage of males is brown or black, barred and marked variously with bronze, red, green, and blue. Women’s plumes usually grow long, sometimes sweeping down the back almost to the floor, with soft, curling, trailing edges, like the tails of ostriches; the colors of the feathers of women are vivid—purple, scarlet, coral, turquoise, gold. Gyr men and women are downy in the pubic region and pit of the arm and often have short, fine plumage over the whole body. People with brightly colored body feathers are a cheerful sight when naked, but they are much troubled by lice and nits.
Moulting is a continuous process, not seasonal. As people age, not all the moulted feathers grow back, and patchy baldness is common among both men and women over forty. Most people, therefore, save the best of their head feathers as they moult out, to make into wigs or false crests as needed. Those whose plumage is scanty or dull can also buy feather wigs at special shops. There are fads for bleaching one’s feathers or spraying them gold or curling them, and wig shops in the cities will bleach, dye, spray, or crimp one’s plumage and sell headdresses in whatever the current fashion is. Poor women with specially long, splendid head feathers often sell them to the wig shops for a fairly good price.
The Gyr write with quill pens. It is traditional for a father to give a set of his own stiff ruff quills to a child beginning to learn to write. Lovers exchange feathers with which they write love letters to one another, a pretty custom, referred to in a famous scene in the play The Misunderstanding by Inuinui:
The Gyr are a staid, steady, traditional people, uninterested in innovation, shy of strangers. They are resistant to technological invention and novelty; attempts to sell them ballpoint pens or airplanes, or to induce them to enter the wonderful world of electronics, have failed. They continue writing letters to one another with quill pens, calculating with their heads, walking afoot or riding in carriages pulled by large, doglike animals called ugnunu, learning a few words in foreign languages when absolutely necessary, and watching classic stage plays written in traditional meters. No amount of exposure to the useful technologies, the marvelous gadgets, the advanced scientific knowledge of other planes—for Gy is a fairly popular tourist stop—seems to rouse envy or greed or a sense of inferiority in the Gyran bosom. They go on doing exactly as they have always done, not stodgily, exactly, but with a kind of dullness, a polite indifference and impenetrability, behind which may lie supreme self-satisfaction, or something quite different.
The crasser kind of tourists from other planes refer to the Gyr, of course, as birdies, birdbrains, featherheads, and so on. Many visitors from livelier planes visit the small, placid cities, take rides out into the country in ugnunu chaises, attend sedate but charming balls (for the Gyr like to dance), and enjoy an old-fashioned evening at the theater, without losing one degree of their contempt for the natives. “Feathers but no wings” is the conventional judgment that sums it up.
Such patronising visitors may spend a week in Gy without ever seeing a winged native or learning that what they took for a bird or a jet was a woman on her way across the sky.
The Gyr don’t talk about their winged people unless asked. They don’t conceal them or lie about them, but they don’t volunteer information. I had to ask questions fairly persistently to be able to write the following description.
Wings never develop before late adolescence. There is no sign at all of the propensity until suddenly a girl of eighteen, a boy of nineteen, wakes up with a slight fever and an ache in the shoulder blades.
After that comes a year or more of great physical stress and pain, during which the subject must be kept quiet, warm, and well-fed. Nothing gives comfort but food—the nascent fliers are terribly hungry most of the time—and being wrapped or swaddled in blankets, while the body restructures, remakes, rebuilds itself. The bones lighten and become porous, the whole upper body musculature changes, and bony protuberances, developing rapidly from the shoulder blades, grow out into immense alar processes. The final stage is the growth of the wing feathers, which is not painful. The primaries are, as feathers go, massive, and may be a meter long. The wingspread of an adult male Gyr is about four meters, that of a woman usually about a half meter less. Stiff feathers sprout from the calves and ankles, to be spread wide in flight.