Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin [Guin, Ursula K. Le]
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T18:55:24.484000+00:00

GREAT JOY

I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT there is a restricted plane. It came as a shock. I'd taken it for granted that once you got the hang of Sita Dulip's Method, you could go from any airport to any plane, and that the options were essentially infinite. The frequent updates to the Encyclopedia Planaria are evidence that the number of known planes keeps increasing. And I thought all of them were accessible (under the right conditions) from all the others, until my cousin Sulie told me about The Holiday Plane.™

This plane can be reached only from certain airports, all of them in the United States, most of them in Texas. At Dallas and Houston there are Holiday Plane Club Lounges for tour groups to this special destination. How they induce the necessary stress and indigestion in these lounges, I do not really want to know.

Nor do I have any wish to visit the plane; but Cousin Sulie has been going there for several years. She was on the way there when she told me about it, and in response to my request she kindly brought me back a whole tote bag full of flyers, brochures, and promotional materials, from which I compiled this description. There is a Web site, though its address seems to change without notice.

Any history of the place has to be mere guesswork. Going by the dates on the brochures, it is not more than ten years old. I imagine a scenario of its origin: a bunch of businessmen are delayed at a Texas airport, and get to talking in that bar where first-class and business-class persons can go but other persons cannot. One of the businessmen suggests they all try out Sita Dulip's Method. Through inexperience or bravado they find themselves not on one of the popular tourist planes but on one not even listed in Roman's Handy Guide. And they find it, in their view, virgin: unexplored, undeveloped, a Third World plane just waiting for the wizardry of the entrepreneur, the magic touch of exploitation. I imagine that the native population was spread out over many small islands and that they were very poor, or fatally hospitable, or both. Evidently they were ready and willing, through innocent hope of gain or love of novelty, to adopt a new way of life. At any rate, ready or not, they learned to do what they were told to do and behave the way they were taught to behave by the Great Joy Corporation.

Great Joy has a kind of Chinese sound to it, but all the promotional literature Cousin Sulie brought me was printed in the United States. The Great Joy Corporation owns the trade-marked name of the plane and issues the PR. Beyond that, I know nothing about Great Joy. I have not tried to investigate it.

It's no use. There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation. Even after they collapse, imploding into a cratered ruin stinking of burnt stockholder and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier

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