“Yes,” she said, smiling and nodding. “They’re quite harmless. But what little pests they are! Spoiling books, and licking envelopes, and snuggling in the bed!”
“Snuggling in the bed?”
“Yes, yes. They were pets, you see.”
Her husband leaned forward to talk to me around her. He was a rosy gentleman. “Teddy bears,” he said in English, smiling. “Yes.”
“Teddy bears?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and then had to resort to his own language—“teddy bears are little animal pets for children, isn’t that right?”
“But they’re not live animals.”
He looked dismayed. “Dead animals?”
“No—stuffed animals—toys—”
“Yes, yes. Toys, pets,” he said, smiling and nodding.
He wanted to talk about his visit to my plane; he had been to San Francisco and liked it very much, and we talked about earthquakes instead of teddy bears. He had found a 5.6 earthquake “a very charming experience, very enjoyable,” and he and his wife and I laughed a great deal as he told about it. They were certainly a nice couple, with a positive outlook.
When I went back to my room I shoved my suitcase up against the bookend that blocked the hole in the wall, and lay in bed hoping that the teddy bears did not have a back door.
Nothing snuggled into the bed with me that night. I woke very early, being jet-lagged by flying from London to Chicago, where my westbound flight had been delayed, allowing me this vacation. It was a lovely warm morning, the sun just rising. I got up and went out to take the air and see the city of Slas on the Islac plane.
It might have been a big city on my plane, nothing exotic to my eye, except the buildings were more mixed in style and in size than ours. That is, we put the big imposing buildings at the center and on the nice streets, and the small humble ones in the neighborhoods or barrios or slums or shantytowns. In this residential quarter of Slas, big houses were all jumbled up together with tiny cottages, some of them hardly bigger than hutches. When I went the other direction, downtown, I found the same wild variation of scale in the office buildings. A massive old four-story granite block towered over a ten-story building ten feet wide, with floors only five or six feet apart—a doll’s skyscraper. By then, however, enough Islai were out and about that the buildings didn’t puzzle me as much as the people did.
They were amazingly various in size, in color, in shape. A woman who must have been eight feet tall swept past me, literally: she was a street sweeper, busily and gracefully clearing the sidewalk of dust. She had what I took to be a spare broom or duster, a great spray of feathers, tucked into her waistband in back like an ostrich’s tail. Next came a businessman striding along, hooked up to the computer network via a plug in his ear, a mouthpiece, and the left frame of his spectacles, talking away as he studied the market report. He came up about to my waist. Four young men passed on the other side of the street; there was nothing odd about them except that they all looked exactly alike. Then came a child trotting to school with his little backpack. He trotted on all fours, neatly, his hands in leather mitts or boots that protected them from the pavement; he was pale, with small eyes, and a snout, but he was adorable.
A sidewalk cafe had just opened up beside a park downtown. Though ignorant of what the Islai ate for breakfast, I was ravenous, ready to dare anything edible. I held out my translatomat to the waitress, a worn-looking woman of forty or so with nothing unusual about her, to my eye, but the beauty of her thick, yellow, fancifully braided hair. “Please tell me what a foreigner eats for breakfast,” I said.
She laughed, then smiled a beautiful, kind smile, and said, via the translatomat, “Well,
“Fruit with cledif, please,” I said, and presently she brought me a plate of delicious-looking fruits and a large bowl of pale yellow gruel, smooth, about as thick as very heavy cream, lukewarm. It sounds ghastly, but it was delicious—mild but subtle, lightly filling and slightly stimulating, like cafe au lait. She waited to see if I liked it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think to ask if you were a carnivore,” she said. “Carnivores have raw cullis for breakfast, or cledif with offal.”
“This is fine,” I said.
Nobody else was in the place, and she had taken a liking to me, as I had to her. “May I ask where you come from?” she asked, and so we got to talking. Her name was Ai Li A Le. I soon realised she was not only an intelligent person but a highly educated one. She had a degree in plant pathology—but was lucky, she said, to have a job as a waitress. “Since the Ban,” she said, shrugging. When she saw that I didn’t know what the Ban was, she was about to tell me; but several customers were sitting down now, a great bull of a man at one table, two mousy girls at another, and she had to go wait on them.
“I wish we could go on talking,” I said, and she said, with her kind smile, “Well, if you come back at sixteen, I can sit and talk with you.”
“I will,” I said, and I did. After wandering around the park and the city I went back to the hotel for lunch and a nap, then took the monorail back downtown. I never saw such a variety of people as were in that car—all shapes, sizes, colors, degrees of hairiness, furriness, featheriness (the street sweeper’s tail had indeed been a tail), and, I thought, looking at one long, greenish youth, even leafiness. Surely those were fronds over his ears? He was whispering to himself as the warm wind swept through the car from the open windows.
The only thing the Islai seemed to have in common, unfortunately, was poverty. The city certainly had been prosperous once, not very long ago. The monorail was a snazzy bit of engineering, but it was showing wear and tear. The surviving old buildings—which were on a scale I found familiar—were grand but run-down, and crowded by the more recent giant’s houses and doll’s houses and buildings like stables or mews or rabbit hutches—a terrible hodgepodge, all of it cheaply built, rickety-looking, shabby. The Islai themselves were shabby, when they weren’t downright ragged. Some of the furrier and featherier ones were clothed only by their fur and feathers. The green boy wore a modesty apron, but his rough trunk and limbs were bare. This was a country in deep, hard economic trouble.
Ai Li A Le was sitting at one of the outside tables at the cafe (the cledifac) next door to the one where she waited tables. She smiled and beckoned to me, and I sat down with her. She had a small bowl of chilled cledif with sweet spices, and I ordered the same. “Please tell me about the Ban,” I asked her.
“We used to look like you,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Well,” she said, and hesitated. “We like science. We like engineering. We are good engineers. But perhaps we are not very good scientists.”
To summarise her story: the Islai had been strong on practical physics, agriculture, architecture, urban development, engineering, invention, but weak in the life sciences, history, and theory. They had their Edisons and Fords but no Darwin, no Mendel. When their airports got to be just like ours, if not worse, they began to travel between planes; and on some plane, about a hundred years ago, one of their scientists discovered applied genetics. He brought it home. It fascinated them. They promptly mastered its principles. Or perhaps they had not quite mastered them before they started applying them to every life-form within reach.
“First,” she said, “to plants. Altering food plants to be more fruitful, or to resist bacteria and viruses, or to kill insects, and so on.”
I nodded. “We’re doing a good deal of that too,” I said.
“Really? Are you…” She seemed not to know how to ask the question she wanted to ask. “I’m corn, myself,” she said at last, shyly.
I checked the translatomat. Uslu: corn, maize. I checked the dictionary, and it said that uslu on Islac and maize on my plane were the same plant.
I knew that the odd thing about corn is that it has no wild form, only a distant wild ancestor that you’d never recognise as corn. It’s entirely a construct of long-term breeding by ancient gatherers and farmers. An early genetic miracle. But what did it have to do with Ai Li A Le?
Ai Li A Le with her wonderful, thick, gold-colored, corn-colored hair cascading in braids from a topknot…
“Only four percent of my genome,” she said. “There’s about half a percent of parrot, too, but it’s recessive. Thank God.”
I was still trying to absorb what she had told me. I think she felt her question had been answered by my
