Ursula K. Leguin - The Flyers Of Gy - An Interplanetary Tale

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The Flyers of Gy

An Interplanary Tale

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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 tail-plumes 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 bodyfeathers 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 headfeathers

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 crimping 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 headfeathers 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 to write love letters to one another, a pretty

custom, referred to in a famous scene in the play The Misunderstanding by

Inuinui:

O my betraying plume, that wrote his love

To her! His love—my feather, and my blood!

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 go on 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 iambic pentameter. 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

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