The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

We would say to them: ‘On our planet, in those regions lying back from the sun, sometimes from the sky fall small white flakes so light and so delicate you can blow them about and around with a breath. This is snow, this is how the water that is always in the air, though invisible to us, changes in those parts when it is frozen by the cold.’

And the children would of course marvel and wonder and wish they might see snow, and the gelid wrinkling waters, and the ice that sometimes made crusts or even plates and sheets.

And then, snow fell.

Across light blue sunlit skies drove thick grey that came swarming down around us in a white fall, and everywhere we stood about, gazing up, gazing down, holding out our hands where the faint white flakes of the tales we told our children lay for an instant before they sank into blobs and smears of water.

It was not a prolonged fall, but it was heavy. One instant our world was as always, green and brown, and coloured with the shine and glisten of moving water, and the easy movement of light clouds. And the next it was a white world. Everywhere, white, and the black jut of the wall rising from it, and on the top of the black, a white crest.

Very often, looking back, we say that we did not understand clearly what was happening, the importance of an event. But I can say that this fall of white from our capacious and mild skies was something that struck into us, our minds and our understandings. Oh yes, we knew, we understood. And, looking into each other’s faces for confirmation of what we felt, it was there – the future.

That scene is as clear in my memory as any. We were all out of our dwellings, we had run together everywhere and were in groups and little crowds, and we were gazing into more than this cold white that had so suddenly enveloped us.

We were a tall lithe people, lightly but strongly built, and our colour was brown, and our eyes were black, and we had long straight black hair. We loved strong and vibrant colours in clothes and in the decoration of our houses: these were what we saw when we looked out at our world – the many blues of the sky, the infinite greens of the foliage, the reds and browns of our earth, mountains shining with pyrites and quartz, the dazzle of water and of sun.

We had not thought, ever, to wonder about our congruity with our surroundings, but on that day we did. We had never seemed to ourselves anything but comely, but against the white glisten that now covered everything we seemed to ourselves dingy and shrunken. Our skins were yellow, and our eyes puckered and strained because of the cold glare we could not escape except by shutting them. The strong colours of our clothes were harsh. We stood there shivering with the suddenness of the drop in temperature, and everywhere could be seen the same involuntary movement: of people looking at each other, finding what they saw ugly, and then, as they remembered that this was how they must be striking others, their eyes turning away, while they hugged themselves in their own arms not only because of the cold, but in a way that suggested a need for comfort, consolation.

Canopus arrived while the snow still lay, unmelted.

There were five of them, not the usual one, or two; and this alone was enough to impress us. They were among us while the snow melted so that our world returned to its warmth and the comfortable colours of growth – and while the snow again fell, and this time stayed for longer. Nor did they leave when this second affliction of white shrank and went. It was never the way of Canopus to demand, announce, threaten – or even to stand high on the crest of our wall, as we sometimes did on civic occasions, to address large crowds. No, they moved quietly among us, staying for a while in one dwelling, and then moving on to another, and while nothing dramatic or painful was ever said, before long we had all gathered from them what was needed.

The snow would come again, and more often; slowly the balance of warmth and cold on our planet would change, and there would be more snow and ice for us than there would be green and growth. And this and this and this was what we must do to prepare ourselves …

We were learning how those on harsher planets matched themselves against cold. We were hearing of houses built thick and strong to withstand weights of snow and the pressures of winds we had never known. We were told of clothing, and footwear, and how to wrap a head in thick cloth so that only the eyes would be exposed – this last impressed us fearfully, for the falls of snow we had seen had not done more than make us shiver and pull our light clothes more tightly around us.

While we were deciding how to make sure those settlements and towns nearest the poles would be protected first, we were told by Canopus that they should be abandoned altogether. All day and night, along that great black wall of ours, pressed crowds of people. We stood on it, we massed beside it. We laid our hands on the cold hard shine of it. We looked at the vast weight and thickness of it. We crowded close under it and looked up at how it towered and we felt it as a safety and guarantee. The wall – our wall – our great black useless monument, that had swallowed all our wealth and our labour and our thoughts and our capacities … it was going to save us all.

We were all now to live on one side of it, leaving the smaller part of our globe empty, for it would soon be uninhabitable. We travelled, many of us, all over those mild and agreeable lands where the crops were still in the fields, the vegetation many-coloured and warm. We were moving there, we knew, because of our need to comprehend. For we did not. One may be told something, act on it, trust in it – but that is not the same as feeling it, as a truth. We – those of us entrusted with the task of moving the populations out of their threatened homes – were always at work, in our imaginations, on the task of really knowing that shortly ice and snow would rule here. And those who had to submit to the move were not taking it in either.

Soon there were new towns and manufactories everywhere on the side of the wall that we believed would remain more or less as it had been … with perhaps snow and even storms, but not so very different from what we had known.

And now, when we stood gathered on the summit of that barrier wall that was going to have to hold the pressures of massing and thrusting ice, and gazed over a still fertile landscape where the future was not visible, except in the skies that had a pallid and pinched look, we felt grief, we were struck and slowed with grief, for at last we had become enabled to feel, really feel, in our substance, in our deepest selves, that our world, our way of living, everything we had been – was done, was over. Finished.

How dark it was, in our minds and our hopes, during that time of preparation, while we busied ourselves with resettling so many people in their new homes, while we took in what we could from Johor and the other emissaries they sent us.

And then we waited. Massing there – for we were now overcrowded and uncomfortable – on the inhabited part of our world, we came to think in this way: that at least the wall, that always visible reminder of our situation, was a proof that we had a future. Our planet had a future.

The time that passed then seemed long to us, and it was; but it was slowed, as well, by the events and thoughts that packed it. Our lives, from being easy, had become hard, the ideas that had inhabited our minds without being questioned were each one tested and – so far had everything changed for us – for the most part set aside.

The crops we had grown and that we were known for in all the near planets no longer thrived. The beasts we had understood and who understood us dwindled and went, and we had new strains of animal who, because their habits were to withstand hardship and threat, did not respond to us lovingly. We had not known how much of the happiness of our lives had been because, as we went among the fields and into the wilder places, we had always been greeted by affectionate creatures. I remember how I and some other representatives of cantons and provinces went out from a town we had used as a meeting place, into a valley we were accustomed to walk in for relaxation after our discussions; and where there had been a fresh bright green, and running streams, and light, quick, playful animals, there were hillsides covered with short, rough greyish plants and rocks growing new species of lichen, grey and thick, like fur – and there was a herd of heavy-shouldered, heavy-jawed cattle, all facing us, their hours lowered, great hooves planted solidly. And, as we stood, trying not to be dismayed, because we had learned to fear our grief, the greyish-brown of their shaggy hides lightened to silvery grey. The air was shedding greyish crumbs. We put out our hands and saw them fill with this rough grey substance. A grey sky seemed to lower itself, pulled down by the weight of itself. We stood there, shivering, pulling close the new clothes Canopus had told us to use, thick and warm and not easy to move about in, and we were there a long time, despite the cold, knowing that we needed such moments of sharp revelation so that we might change inwardly, to match our outward changes.

That part of our world beyond the wall was now grey and gelid and slow and cold, and filled with the creatures of the cold. First it was all bitter frosts, and flaking and then splitting stones, so that whole mountains changed their aspect, becoming littered and loose; and lowered and sullen skies, where clouds had become thick and dark – and then the snows came, showers and squalls of snow, and after that storms that raged a day, and then days at a time. Everything beyond our wall was white, and the new animals came crowding down towards us, their coats dragging with snow, their eyes looking sullenly out from the snow on their faces. But the snows melted, leaving the greys and the browns, and then came again – and again; and did not melt so quickly, and then did not melt at all.

Canopus said to us that we, the Representatives, should walk around our planet on the top of the wall. About fifty of us, then, set out; and Canopus came with us. The task took us almost a year. We walked into, not with, the revolving of the planet so that the sun always rose ahead of us, and we had to turn ourselves around when we wanted to see how the shadows gathered at nightfall. Because the top of the wall for the greater part of its way was so narrow, we walked no more than two or three abreast, and those at the back of this company had it brought into us how small and few we were under skies that on our right were packed with snow clouds. On the other side of the wall, but far down towards the pole, the skies were often still blue, and sometimes even warm, and down there were the greens and browns of a summery land, and the streams were quick and lively. To our right the grey and dour landscape was obscured again and again by snow. We could see that the whiteness of cold had claimed the far mountains on our right, and was covering the foothills and spreading out down the valleys. And the winds that come pouring down from there hurt our lungs and made our eyes sting, so that we turned our heads away and looked down over the part of our world that still said to us, Welcome, here nature is as warm and as comfortable as your flesh. But Canopus kept directing us – gently, but making sure we did it – to look as much as we could into the world of cold.

And so we went, day after day, and it was as if we walked into a spreading blight, for soon, even on the left side of the wall we saw how grasses shrank and dimmed and vegetation lost its lustre, and the skies lowered themselves with a white glare somewhere behind the blue. And on the right the snows were reaching down, down, towards us, and our familiar landscapes were hard to recognize.

There was a day that we stood all together on our barrier wall, looking up into the freezing immensities, with Canopus among us, and we saw that the enormous heavy animals that Canopus had brought us from another of their planets were crowding close in to the wall. They massed there, in vast herds, with the snow driving down behind them, and they were lifting their great heads and wild trapped eyes at the wall, which they could not cross. A short way ahead of us was a narrow gap which we had closed with a sliding door half the wall’s height.

Canopus did not have to tell us what we must do. Some of us went down the side of the wall on to the rough soil, where the grasses had long since gone, leaving a thin crust of lichens, and pulled back the gates. The herds lifted their heads and swung their horns and trampled their feet in indecision, and then saw that this was their deliverance – and first one beast and then another charged through the gap, and soon from all over the frozen lands came charging and thundering herds of animals, and they all, one after another, went through the gap. What heavy clumsy beasts they were! We could never become accustomed to their mass and weight and ponderousness. On their heads were horns which at their base were thicker than our thighs, and sometimes they had four and even six horns. Their hooves left behind prints that would make small ponds. Their shoulders, to support these crests and clubs of bone, were like the slopes of hills. Their eyes were red and wild and suspicious, as if their fate was to query forever what had ordained them to carry such weights of bone and horn and meat and hair, for their coats hung down around them like tents.

These herds passed through the gap in our wall, taking twenty of our days to do it, and soon there were none of these beasts of the cold in that part of our world that was doomed to be swallowed by the cold. They were all in the more favoured parts – and we knew, without Canopus having to say anything to us, what it meant.

Had we really imagined that our guardian wall would contain all of the snow and ice and storm on one side of it, leaving everything on the other side warm and sweet? No, we had not; but we had not, either, really taken into our understandings that the threat would strike so hard into where we now all lived … into where we were crowding, massed, jostling together, with so much less of food and pleasantness that our former selves, our previous conditions, seemed like a dream of some distant and favoured planet that we only imagined we had known.

We stood there, looking into hills and valleys where grass still grew, though more thinly, and where the movement of water was still quick and free; we saw how the herds of animals of the cold spread everywhere, making our ears ring and hurt with their savage exulting bellowing because they had found some grass. We were a company of thin yellow light-boned birdlike creatures, engulfed in the thick pelts of the herds, wildly gazing at a landscape that no longer matched us. And, as we had taken to doing more and more, we gazed up, our eyes kept returning to the skies, where the birds moved easily. No, they were not the small and pretty birds of the warm times, flocks and groups and assemblies darting and swirling and swooping as one, moving as fast as water does when its molecules are dancing. They were the birds of this chilly time, individual, eagles and hawks and buzzards, moving slowly on wings that did not beat, but balanced. They too had heavy shoulders and their eyes glared from thick feathers, and they circled and swept about the skies on the breath of freezing winds that had killed our familiar flocks sometimes as they flew; so that, seeing the little brightly coloured bodies drop from the air, we had looked up and imagined we could see, too, the freezing blast that had struck them down out of the sky. But they were birds, these great savage creatures; they could move; they could sweep from one end of a valley to the other in the time we could hold a breath. We had once been as they were, we told ourselves, as we stood there on the wall slowed and clumsy in our thick skins – the wall which, on the side towards the ice, was dimmed and clouded, no longer a brilliant shining black, but shades of grey. Frosted grey.

Now that the herds had all gone through the wall, we filled the gap by pushing across the gate. But Canopus said that as soon as we got back to our houses, work parties must be sent out, and this gap, and the others that had been left, must be built up as strongly and thickly as all the rest of the wall. For the openings that had been ordered to be left in the wall long before there had been cold, or even the first signs of cold, to save animals that had not even been brought to our planet, had fulfilled their purpose. We no longer needed them. The wall must be perfect and whole and without a weak place.

We walked on for some days after that before there was a blizzard of an intensity we had not even been able to imagine. We huddled on the safe side of the wall, while the winds screamed over us and sometimes came sucking and driving down where we were, and we shivered and we shrank, and knew that we had not begun to imagine what we had, all of us, to face. And when the screaming and scouring stopped and we climbed up the little projecting steps to the top, carefully because of the glaze of ice on them, we saw that on the cold side snow had fallen so heavily that all the hollows and the heights of the landscape were filled in with billowy white, and the wall was only half its previous height.

By then we were not far from our starting place, and we all longed to be back in our homes, our new thick-walled solid houses with roofs that had been pitched to throw off any snowfall – so we had thought. But now wondered. Were we going to have to live under snow as some creatures lived under water? Were we going to have to make little tunnels and caves for ourselves under a world of snow?

But still, on our side of the wall, where our towns and cities and farms spread, there was some green, there was the shine of moving water. And knowing of our hunger and our desperation and our longing, Canopus did not now make us turn our faces from this livingness, but allowed us to stumble on, looking warmthwards, trying to ignore the snowy wilderness that was crowding down on us.

And it was during these days that Johor fell back with me, and talked to me, alone. I listened to him and I had my eyes on my fellows in front, the Representatives, and when I knew that what I was being told was for me, and not for them – not yet, at least, because they could not yet face it – there came into me an even deeper sense of what was in store. But what worse could there possibly be?

Ahead of us this great wall of ours stood high and black above marshes where the snows of the blizzard had partly melted, leaving streaks and blobs of thin white on dark water. We stood there, Johor and I, and watched our companions walk away, and become no more than a moving blur on the crest of the wall where it rose to cross a ridge and then disappeared from our view. It climbed again, and we saw it, still mighty and tall though so far away, showing exactly what its nature was, for on one side the snows piled, and on the other the beasts fed on wintry grass and on low grey bushes.

Johor touched my arm, and we walked forward to stand where the marshes lay on either side. On the right the dark white-streaked waters seemed channels to the world of snow and ice. But on the other side the marshes were an estuary which led to the ocean. We called it that, though it was really a large lake, enclosed by land. We had been told of, and some of us had seen, planets that were more water than land – where lumps and pieces and even large areas of land were in watery immensities. It is hard to believe in something very far from experience. With us everything was the other way about. Our ‘ocean’ was always a marvel to us. Was precious. Our lives depended on it, we knew that, for it helped us to make our atmosphere. It seemed to us to represent distant and rare truths, was a symbol to us of what was hard to attain and must be guarded and sheltered. Those of you who live on planets where liquids are as common as earth and rocks and sand will find it as hard to imagine our cherishing of this ‘ocean’ of ours as we found it to visualize planets where water masses bathed the whole globe in a continuous living movement, speaking always of wholeness, oneness, interaction, of rapid and easy interchange. For the basis of our lives, the substance which bound us in continuity, was earth. Oh yes, we knew that this soil and rock that made our planet, with water held so shallowly in it, and only in one place, except for the streams and rivers that fed it, was something that moved, just as water moved – we knew rock had its currents, like water. We knew it because Canopus had taught us to think like this. Solidity, immobility, permanence – this was only how we with our Planet 8 eyes had to see things. Nowhere, said Canopus, was permanence, was immutability – not anywhere in the galaxy, or the universe. There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow. And at a hillside. Or a mountain.

I was standing there with my back to the icy winds, face towards our precious lake that was out of sight beyond tall plumy reeds, and I was thinking: And ice? – we must see this new enemy of ours as something all fluidity and movement? And it was at that moment that it came into me for the first time that our ocean might freeze. Even though it was on the ‘safe’ side of our barrier wall. The thought came like a blast of cold. I knew it would be so, and I already felt something of what Canopus was going to tell me. I did not want to turn and face Johor – face what I had to.

I felt his touch on my elbow again and I did turn.

I saw him as he saw me, fragile and vulnerable inside thick pelts, hands hidden inside sleeves, eyes peering out from deep shaggy hoods.

It is a hard thing, to lose the sense of physical appropriateness – and again my eyes went skywards where an eagle lay poised on air just above us.

‘Representative,’ said Johor gently, and I made my gaze return downwards, to what I could see of his yellow face.

‘Your ocean will freeze,’ he said.

I could feel my bones huddle and tremble inside my thin flesh.

I tried to joke: ‘Canopus can bring us new beasts with heavy bones for the cold – but what can you do for our bones? Or shall we all die out as our other animals did, to make way for new species – new races?’

‘You will not die out,’ he said, and his strong brown eyes – inflamed though, and strained – were forcing me to look at him.

Another new thought came into me, and I asked: ‘You were not born on Canopus, so you said. What kind of planet did you come from?’

‘I was given existence on a warm and easy planet.’

‘As Planet 8 was, once.’

‘As the planet is that you will all be going to.’

At this I was silent for a very long time. There were too many adjustments to make in my thoughts – which whirled about and did not settle into patterns that could frame useful questions.