The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

We, the three Representatives, agreed to go on.

Because the skies were clear and blue on that third day we could see the great white birds everywhere, floating over the snows and the ice, looking downwards for – what prey? At first we could see nothing, but then, straining our eyes against the glare, did see small movements that seemed to creep and run in a way different from the smoke and the surge of snows moved by the wind. And then we saw little black specks on the white, and they were droppings; and then larger pieces that were the droppings of the white birds, which had in them fur and bones, and from these we were able to form some picture of the little snow animals before we actually saw one: we were on it, it was under our feet, and it rolled over in a pleading confiding way as if in play. A sort of rodent, completely white, with soft blue eyes. And once we had seen them we were able to pick them out, running around, though not very many – certainly not to be seen as a food supply. Unless they could be bred in captivity? But what were they feeding on? We saw one eating the droppings of the big birds … if the birds ate them, and they ate their own remnants in the birds’ droppings, then this was a closed cycle and hardly feasible – but there seemed nothing available for them to eat. We did see a few, a very few, snow-beetles, or some kind of insect, white too – but what did they feed on, if they were the food of the little white beasts?

As we planned to travel polewards for several days yet, we did not capture specimens but pressed on. Ahead I knew was a range of hills and in them some deep caves, and we hoped they would not be completely iced in. On an afternoon when the sky was a metallic dark-blue glare, we slid and staggered our way up a river that we knew was one only because we had enjoyed it when it ran between green fertile banks and was crowded with boats and swimmers. The sides now rose sheer up, cliffs of ice. To reach the place of the caves we had to cut steps in the ice, and the boy Nonni fell and hurt his arm very badly, though he pretended not to be much hurt.

Although it would soon be dark and we wanted very much to be sheltered, we had to give him time to recover. We sat down in a hollow in the ice, with our backs to the cliff and looking out over a coldly brilliant scene: a sharp blue sky that seemed to us cruel, defining the dead white of the landscape. We were breathing shallowly and as little as we could because each breath hurt our lungs. Our limbs ached. Our eyes kept trying to close themselves. Yet we knew that what we felt was nothing compared to the pain that made Nonni sit cramped there, breathing at long intervals in great gasps, his eyes seeing nothing of the vivid blue and white and dazzle around us. He was not far from slipping off into unconsciousness, and Alsi put her arms around him from behind, carefully because of his broken elbow, or shoulder – we could not tell what was broken, because of the mass of clothing – and she enclosed him in her vitality and her strength. To us three watching, the contrast between the two young faces was a warning: hers, in spite of what she had to endure, so alive and commanding, his all drowse and yellow indifference.

‘Nonni,’ she began, in what was at once evident to us as a deliberate attempt to rouse him, ‘Nonni, wake up, talk to us, you must keep awake, you must talk …’

And, as his face showed the peevishness and irritation of his reluctance, she persisted, ‘No, no, Nonni, I want you to talk. You lived near here, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Come on, tell us!’ He shifted his head from side to side, and then turned it away from the pressure of her cheek on his, but his eyes opened and there was consciousness in them: he understood what she was doing for him.

‘Where did you live?’

He indicated with a weak lift of his head, which at once fell back against her shoulder, that it was somewhere there in front of us.

‘And how? And what did you do?’

‘You know what I did!’

‘Go on!’

Again he resisted her, with an involuntary movement that said he wanted only to slide away into sleep, but she would not let him, and he gasped out: ‘Before The Ice, it was there – there.’

There was now the plain of snow, undulating, cut by crevasses and sending up small eddies and whirls of snow.

‘And you lived in a town down there, and it was one of our largest towns, and people used to come from all over the planet to visit it, because it was the only town like it? A new kind of town?’

He struggled to evade her with irritable shiftings of his head, shutting his eyes, but again his will to live came back.

‘The town was built there because these hills are full of iron. Under the ice here are the mine workings. A road goes from here to there – the best road on the planet, because of what it had to carry, heavy loads of ore, from which we made trucks to carry even more ore …’

Here he seemed to drowse again, and Alsi said: ‘Please, Nonni.’

‘Before our town was built and we began mining, there was no centre for making iron, though it was made in a small way everywhere. It was Canopus who told us to look for iron here, and what to look for, and then how to work it and mix it with other metals. It was clear to us that these metals we were making would change the way we all lived. Some people did not like what was happening. Some left our town again and went to live in other places where life had not changed.’

‘And you, did you like it?’

‘It seems that I must have, because I was going to be a worker in metals, like my parents. Both of them knew all the new processes. Just before The Ice I travelled with them, to a town not far from our ocean, and it was the first time I had seen anything different.’

‘And how did it seem?’ said Alsi, teasing him, for she knew.

‘It seemed to me charming,’ he said, full again of the youthful scornfulness he had felt, so that we all laughed, and he laughed too, since now he was able to look back and see himself. ‘Yes, it was so pretty, and so soft. With us everything was so much harder. Every day we had a new invention or discovery, and we were learning to make metals we hadn’t ever thought of. It seemed as if something quite new had happened to us, and we could not help but make new things and have new ideas. After that visit, I was glad to get back. And Canopus came again about then. Because we had seen how differently people lived in other parts of the planet, and we could make comparisons, we asked Canopus how things were on other planets. And suddenly our minds seemed filled with newness … we were stretched … we were much larger than we had been … we knew how many different ways there were of living, we talked about how species began and grew and changed – and died out…’ Here he stopped for a moment and was silent, a darkness coming over his face.

‘Nonni, we are not going to die out, Canopus says so.’

‘Some of us will not,’ he said, in a direct statement of something he felt, something he knew, and it chilled us. We knew then, or at least we older ones did, that Nonni would not survive.

‘That was the real change, it seems to me now. Not only that because we were making new metals and all kinds of machines we knew life on our planet would change, but because for the first time we thought in this way at all – and then began to think about how many different ways of living there could be – and then, of course, it followed that we wondered if we could choose how we would develop, choose the direction we would go in … It seems now as if what really happened for the first time was the idea of choice … And then there was The Ice!’ And he laughed out strongly, an angry laugh, as only the very young can laugh. The anger injected energy into him, and he staggered up, and was supported by Alsi. ‘What are we doing sitting here? Look, the light is going. We should get under cover.’

It was he who led the way up while we followed, watching him so that we could hold him if he slipped. But his strength held out until we got to shelter, though it was the last real effort he was able to make for himself.

We found under a deep overhang of blue ice a part-frozen dirt shelf, and behind that a cave with a soft dirt floor – and so long did it already seem to us since we had seen earth that we handled it with affection and in need for reassurance. Touching it released odours, and we knew that this was guano, or droppings, and looking up thought we could see bats, but there were none, they had been killed by the cold. Yet in this cave, with the unfrozen dirt beneath our feet, there was something that disturbed us, made us look continually over our shoulders.

We spread our pelts on the cave floor, and lit a big fire in the entrance, using the guano as fuel; and when the flames leaped up, and the smoke began to eddy, we heard a stirring in the heart of the cave, as if creatures were alerted, and were withdrawing farther and deeper. We kept vigil all that night, though in the comparative warmth of the place we all found it easy to sleep. We each took a watch, and all felt that a watch was being kept on us – we had a sense of being stared at. In the morning, we felt the lack of something that it had not occurred to us to supply ourselves with. We needed a torch. There was no branch or stick or anything that would make a torch. The daylight fell only a little way into the cave. All five of us, in a strong close group, went as far into the cave as we dared, and knew that not far from us were living beings. We sensed a mass of living warmth. Many small things? A few large ones? And if large, what? The vegetation-eaters of our lost time could not have survived.

Did the little snow rodents mass in what caves still were free of the ice packs? Did the great birds nest in caves? Was there some other kind of bird or animal we had not imagined?

It was with feelings of loss, even of anguish, that we left those creatures behind: this was because, of course, we identified with them. How could we not, pressed in upon as we were, so that our lives became ever smaller and narrower? We could feel for these poor animals, whatever they were, surviving in an icebound cave.

We travelled on polewards, but more slowly because of Nonni’s bad arm. He could not help with pulling the sliding carts, and Alsi did his work. And then we lost our sense of time, and of distance, as we laboured on, and on; our eyes burning, the exposed skin of our faces painful, and even the bones of our bodies protesting – those light elegant bones of ours that had been made by nature for easy and graceful movement. Over us storms came down, and we were enclosed in shrieking winds that never stopped, until we came to believe that a screaming of air in violent movement was what was normal, and silence or the soft stirrings of breezes and zephyrs only what we made ourselves imagine to save our reason from present horror. And then, when the storms stopped, and we found newly deposited snows preventing our struggling progress forwards, and the snow masses fled past overhead, our space in the world seemed shrunk to no more than our group of shivering bodies, so that we were in a white room whose walls pressed in on us as we moved and that moved with us. And when the skies lifted and cleared, and we were in a high valley surrounded by tall icy peaks, there was no life but in ourselves, our few small selves huddled together there. Again we could not put up our tent on the hard ice. Night came down on us and we did not sleep, for the wonder and the splendour and the terror of the place. Overhead a black sky, with a few brilliant stars. No wind, no clouds, only silence. We crouched there, trembling, and gazed up, at this bright star and then at another, asking if this was the sun of Rohanda, the fruitful planet, or if that was; and we talked of the race that Canopus was bringing up to a level of high evolution, and we wondered how these people, who in our imaginations had everything brave and strong and good in them, would welcome us and make us at home … and we talked of how we two races, these nurslings of Canopus and ourselves, who were also the children of Canopus, their creation, would work together, and live together and become even stronger and better. And we, the three older ones, were aware of the vibrant expectation and longing of the two young ones, and we felt for them all the warm protective love that a passing generation must feel for its charges.

How still it was through that long night, and how beautiful! The silence was so deep we could hear the small crystalline whispering of the stars. And, before dawn, when the cold was so intense our thick fleecy coats seemed to have crumbled away, leaving us naked, one of the high glittering peaks that surrounded us let out a violent cracking noise, as the icy blast bit into it, and this sound was echoed by another peak, and in a moment all the mountains seemed to be shouting and groaning and protesting with the cold. And then it was silent again, and the stars sparkled and invited. We did not believe we would survive the night, and in the first light that made everything glitter and hurt our eyes we found Nonni slow and heavy, and we pushed back the shags of fur from around his face so we could see the truth of his state: and his flesh was thin and yellow and clung to his bones, and his dark eyes had no answer in them. We were still a good way from the pole. I remembered that there had been a cave not far from here, and we carried him to it. He was so light he lay in my arms like a child. The cave had a small entrance, a hole in the snow; and there was no guano there. The floor was a hard greyish mixture of soil and frost, and we had no sense of animals watching from the cave’s recesses. We found piles of straw from – we supposed – the habitation of a solitary or a hermit, and with this we made a bit of a fire. But there was not enough warmth to save Nonni, and he died. And we could not bury him, for the floor was too hard. We left him there, in his thick pelts, and we four, wondering which of us would be next, went on with this journey of ours that we believed useless and perhaps even criminal, until we saw ahead of us a tall black spiring thing. It was the column that Canopus had asked us to erect at the place of the pole. But it was not as high as we remembered it, for the ice had reached more than half way up it. The columns were at the poles because the spacecraft of Canopus found them useful as markers when they came in to land.

It seemed to us that the sun here at the top of our world was hotter than anywhere on our journey. It will be remembered that I said there was the very slightest inclination of our planet on its axis, which had never been enough to make much difference in our good times; but now we wondered if perhaps, because we were in such extremities of climate, this small slant might make enough of a change to call it a summer, when the other pole in its turn reached forward closer to the sun. Well, it turned out that it was so: there was the briefest season of weather when a slight increase in warmth made it possible to bring on crops and cosset a few vegetables. But it could not be summer enough to change our situation.

Here at the top of the planet, with nothing around us but glazed ice on which we could hardly keep our footing, we had to acknowledge that we had not found anything that could be of use as foodstock, except perhaps the white snow creatures. Which did not live up here, in these latitudes – here nothing lived. And our small livingness, our slow and cold-confused thoughts seemed to us out of place, almost an affront to nature which had ordained only the silences of the ice, the shrieking of the storms.

On the way back, the girl fell ill and we had to pull her along on one of the carts – there was room for her, now we had eaten nearly all our dried meat. When we reached the valleys, where the small movement of the snow animals showed on the snows among the shadows of the great birds that swung their white wings overhead, we caught several. This was easy, for they did not know enough to fear us. They were confiding little beasts, and snuggled up to the girl who lay half-conscious on her bed, and their sweetness and warmth revived her, and she wept for the first time, because of the death of her friend Nonni.

Of the journey back there is no need to say any more than it was frightful, and every dragging and painful step told us how foolish we had been to match ourselves against dangers we had not been equipped to measure. When at last we reached where we expected to see our black wall, we did not see it. It was a blindingly brilliant glittering morning, after a night of snow that fell so heavily we thought we might be suffocated by it. Stumbling on, our eyes half-closed against the glare, we nearly stepped straight over a cliff – our wall; we had walked up to it at the level of its top, for ice and snow had filled in everything. Standing there and looking down, we could see that snow had been blown down from the cold side into drifts along the foot of the wall. Not deep drifts but enough to cover the earth to a good distance.

We climbed carefully down the slippery dangerous steps into safety. Alsi soon recovered, and she took the little beasts that had shared her cart with her to the Animal Makers, and at last, after much experimentation, it was found they would eat lichens and the low bushes of the tundras. But what had they lived on when they were in that wilderness of frozen water? It was at last decided that in the caves there must have been supplies of straw or leaves, or perhaps even some sort of vegetation growing. We bred these creatures for food; but our problem was, after all, that we were not able to grow enough to feed animals. The great herds, which had seemed able to thrive on such sparse and dry vegetation, were now roaming restlessly from valley to hillside and even up the mountains in search of food. If the cold was going to creep down past our barrier wall, then we must expect our grasses and shrubs to dwindle – and the herds to dwindle too.

It was this pressure on us that made our more tender-minded Representatives agree to think again about our lake. Our ocean. A ceremony was made of it. All the populations of the valleys round about, and delegations from every part of our planet, stood along the edges of our ocean. It was a sombre, grey morning, and the crowds were silent and grey. From where we stood on the low hills on one side of the stretch of water, we could see a greyish brown huddling of people around the far shores. We Representatives were on the shore nearest the wall, and we could see, far over the mountains on the other side of the water, a light greyish blue sky that seemed still to smile. Populations under threat know silences that they understand nothing of in lighthearted times. The people around me could be observed turning their faces about, to look into other faces; all were silent, or speaking only in very low voices, and it came into my mind that the reason for this deep attentiveness was because they were, we all were, listening. Everything we had to do was difficult and hateful to us, we were not at ease with even the smallest and most ordinary and often-repeated things in our daily lives, from the putting on of the heavy coats to the preparing of the fatty meat which was our staple food; not at ease in our sleep that was always threatened by cold creeping in from somewhere, a heavy weight of cold that seemed to subside into us, like water soaking clay; not at ease even in the stretching out of a hand or a smile, for our bodies and faces seemed always too light and friable for what they had to do and had to express. There seemed to be nothing left to us that was instinctive and therefore joyful, or ordinarily pleasurable. We were foreign to ourselves as much as to our surroundings. And therefore groups, and crowds, sank easily and often into silences. As if this sense, hearing, was being pressed into service in default of other senses which we needed and lacked. We listened – the eyes of every one of us had in them always a look of waiting to hear or receive some news, or message or information.

There had been some of us Representatives who had said that we ought to make of this occasion, the dedicating of our lake to usefulness and productivity, a ceremony of songs and chants, contrasting the bleakness of our present time with the past. The so recent past… it was only the young children there who did not remember our lake set blue and bright among the greens and yellows of foliage. What need of a formal ritual of memory? Our stretch of shining waters had been blue, and had been green, and there had been little white wavelets on it. Brown rocks had made diving places all around the amazingly and improbably coloured shores … living always in dun and grey and dirt colour, the hues of a warmed and fruitful land come to seem extraordinary, almost impossible. Had we stood here, we people of our stricken planet – stood here and looked at lively brown bodies diving and swimming in sky-reflecting waters? We had danced and sung around these shores on warm nights when these soft dark waters had seemed crammed with stars? We had? Well, we knew we had, and we told our younger children about it all … and their eyes, puzzling at our faces, said they believed it all as they believed the legends we had been given by Canopus to repeat to them. For Canopus had told us Representatives a thousand tales that would prepare the minds of our people for understanding our role as a planet among planets, and how we were cherished and fed and watched over by Canopus. I myself remember how, as a small child, I was taken out on to a hillside by the Representatives of the time, with other children, on a soft warm night, and shown how a certain brilliant star, low on the horizon, was Canopus, our fostering and nurturing star. I remember how I fought with my own mind to take it all in, how I matched the rustling of the grasses around me, the familiar warmth of my parents’ hands, and the pleasant smell of their flesh, with the thought: that shining thing up there, that little shine, is a world, like ours, like our planet here, and I must remember when I look at that star that it is a world, and my Maker.

I remember how I part-understood, partially accepted. And how the legends and tales sank into my mind and fed it, and made in me a place that I could enter at will, to refresh myself, and to feed myself with largeness and wholeness. But it had not been easy, that slow change, monitored always (as I knew, though with difficulty) by Canopus.

What our task was that cold day looking out across the grey water was to hear from each other, and to understand, that this sacredness, this untouched wonder of a place, which we had swum in and played in but never never desecrated – was now to be farmed as we had once farmed nearly all the planet. As we still did farm the small area around the pole that was thrust forward – slightly, only very slightly – into our sun’s fruitful light. Yes, we were making use of our slight, almost imperceptible ‘summer’. We would harvest from our ‘ocean’ the creatures in it, but carefully, for there were many of us, and not so many of them that we could take as much as we liked.

The Representatives for the Keeping of the Lake, its Guardians, named Rivalin, stood forth from the silent crowds, and got into a boat that was decorated and made as cheerful as we could contrive with our now so limited resources of vegetation – some garlands made of lichens, and stalks of grain – and sailed out a little way from our chilly shores, and stood there on the deck, holding up the new instruments, for all to see. They were nets, and all kinds of lines with hooks, and spears and harpoons. These last were because there were tales that deep in the centre of our lake were monsters. Sometimes people had drowned, though not often, and it was said they had been taken down into the deeps of the lake by these great creatures no one had ever seen. And which never had existed – or at least, we never saw them.

Something happened when the Representatives lifted up the new weapons, high above their heads, and turned them around to show us. A groan or cry came out from the crowds, and this sound, which had been pressed out of us, frightened us all. There were moments of wild lament. For what? Because our necessity made us violate what had previously been sacred to us? It was not only on our shore that this wild groaning cry rose up from the people. All around the edges of the lake, people had gone out in boats with the implements of catching the creatures of the water, and from every shore had come this keening dirge.