The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

When I was slightly recovered, I still was facing Johor, who stood with his back to a wind that came pouring down from the snow fields.

‘You are always travelling,’ I said. ‘You are seldom on your own planet – do you miss it?’

He did not answer. He was waiting.

‘If we are all to be space-lifted away from our home, then why the wall? Why were we not taken away when the snows first began to fall?’

‘The hardest thing for any one of us to realize – every one of us, no matter how high in the levels of functioning – is that we are all subject to an overall plan. A general Necessity.’

‘It was not convenient?’ And my voice was bitter.

‘When we took you for training to the other planets, did you ever hear of the planet Rohanda?’

I had, and my curiosity was already expectation – and even a warm and friendly expectation.

‘Yes, it is a beautiful planet. And quite one of our most successful attempts …’ He smiled, though I could not see his smile, only the change in the shape of his eyes, for his mouth was covered: and I smiled too – ruefully, of course. For it is not easy to accept oneself as an item among many.

‘Our poor planet is not a successful attempt!’

‘It is not anyone’s fault,’ he said. ‘The Alignments have changed … unexpectedly. We believed that Planet 8 was destined for stability and slow growth. As things have not turned out that way, we mean to take you to Rohanda. But first another phase of development there must be concluded. It is a question of raising a certain species there to a level where, when your kind are brought in, you will make a harmonious whole. That is not yet. Meanwhile you, on this planet, must be sheltered from the worst of what will happen.’

‘The wall, then, is something to hold off the worst of the snow?’

‘The worst of the ice that will come pressing down in great sheets and plates and will rise against the wall. Down there, where we look now …’ and he turned me about to face away from the cold towards the warm pole, ‘it will be bad enough. You may have a hard time of it, surviving. And this wall will hold, so we believe, the force of the ice. For long enough.’

‘And you do not want us all to know that we must leave our Home Planet for Rohanda?’

‘It is enough that one of you knows.’

It took time to digest this. Time and observation. For without my ever telling anyone at all, not even the other Representatives, it became known that we would all be space-lifted to another beautiful warm planet, where our lives would become again as they had once been – in a past that seemed so far from us. Though it was not far, only on the other side of the physical change in our lives that had been so sharp and sudden that we could hardly believe what we had been.

Johor and the other Canopeans left us, having made sure that all the gaps in our wall were well and strongly filled. And that no living thing was left on the cold side of the wall. It seemed a dead place, where now the blizzards raged almost continuously, the winds howled and shrieked, and the snows heaped themselves up and up so that even the mountains seemed likely to become buried. And then, standing on our wall to gaze there, our gloved hands held to shield our streaming eyes, we saw that the mountains had a glassy look, and that between the foothills crept tongues of ice. A few of us did wrap ourselves, and made little carts that could slide on runners, and we ventured up into that frigid and horrible land to find out what we could. It was like a journey into another part of ourselves, so slowed and difficult were our movements, so painful the breaths we had to take. All we could see was that the snows piled up, up, into the skies, and the packs of ice crept down. And, this expedition over, we stood huddled on our wall, looking at where we had been, and saw how the snow came smoking off fields of white and eddied up into skies that were a hard cold blue.

We had a great deal to do, all of us, and most particularly we Representatives. The physical problems, bad enough, were the least of it. Now that it had spread from mind to mind that we had a home waiting for us, in a favoured part of the galaxy, where we could again be congruous with our surroundings, a quick-moving, shining-brown-skinned, healthy race under blue skies – now that this dream had taken hold of us, our present realities seemed to numb us even more. And when we looked up and saw how the snows had massed themselves into packs of gleaming ice with great cracks that could run from one horizon to another – this present horror came to seem less real to us than Rohanda, where we were bound. When? We were coming to yearn, to long, for our deliverance, and against this I and the others had to fight. For if we allowed ourselves to lapse into daydreams and longings, then none of us would be alive to make that final journey to the lovely planet.

One of our difficulties was that when our peoples had been moved away from the cold, everything that had been built to shelter them and their beasts faced away from the blizzards. Standing on the wall, what had to strike us first was how villages and towns huddled and crept and hid away, and there seemed no windows or openings, for these were on the other side. Before, our towns had been spread about and seemed haphazard, as towns do, when built to catch the advantages of an amenable slope, or of a fertile wind. Now, as we looked down, a town might seem like a single building, in which one might walk from room to room through a valley. So vulnerable they looked, our new homes, so easily crushed, as we stood high there, feeling the winds tear and buffet us, knowing the strength of what was to come – and yet, down again at earth level, inside a town, it was easy to forget what threatened. It was sheltered, for the winds streamed above. All the apertures showed hills still green, and mountains green for a good part of the way up to their summits, and there was the glint and shine of water, and patches of misty blue appeared among the thick grey of the cloud. Down there was fertility and warmth and pleasantness … At the margins of the eye’s reach was our heart’s desire.

What were we to do, then, we Representatives? Force these people for whom we were responsible to look back – look up? There behind them was the rampart of the wall, so high from these low huddles they lived in that a third of the sky was blocked out. A wall like a cliff, a sheer black shining cliff. Still black on this side, though if you stood close to it and gazed into the shine that had once mirrored blue skies where the white clouds of what now seemed an interminable summer ambled and lazed, it could be seen that the smooth black had a faint grey bloom. Could be seen that the minutest scratchiest lines marred the shine. Frost. And in the early mornings the whole glossy surface had a crumbling grey look to it.

Were we to insist that every individual in the land climb up the steps to the top of the wall and look icewards, feel the threat of the gale, know what lay there always on the other side of the wall? We were to make a ritual of it, perhaps?

Often enough we, the fifty or so of us, would climb up there to look out and up to the cold pole for new changes and threats – and debate how to combat this weakening mood among the people.

Perhaps it was the extent of the changes that prevented us. A world of snow – was how we had thought of it. But it was ice now. The snow had packed, had massed, had gone hard and heavy. A ringing world – a stone flung on to it reverberated. It seemed to us as we stood high there, the wind in our faces, that a bird swooping past could make the ice sing and thrum. And when the blizzards came, the winds drove snow masses up into the air, whirled them around the hard clanging skies and dropped them again, to slide and swirl into new piles and drifts. Soon to freeze again and make new ice packs that came driving down the valleys towards us. Now as we looked out, we had to remind ourselves of the real height of the barrier wall by glancing down behind us to the sheltered side, for the snows were more than halfway up the wall. Quite soon – we joked – we would be able to step off the top of that wall and simply walk off on snow. Or on ice.

We decided not to institute rituals of snow-watching and wall-climbing, or make strong songs to combat the soft wailing yearning songs that now were heard all day and half the night. We did not really know how to assess the effects that such forced submersions in reality might have.

Once we had known exactly what would result from this or that decision.

It was in the nature of the new dispensation that the Representatives who had the care of the animals were now more important than any of us. Only down near the warm pole was it possible to grow crops, and these were of new cold-resistant varieties. We could now grow enough to feed people as much grain as once we did.

Our diet had changed, and very fast. The herds of enormous shaggy beasts who seemed to thrive on the new thin grasses and lichens gave us meat, gave us hides for clothing, provided us with cheeses and all kinds of soured milks that we had not before troubled to develop. A child was now weaned on to meat and cheeses: not long ago the diet would have been cooked grains – our food had been mostly fruit and cereals and vegetables. We wondered how this new way of eating might be affecting us. Canopus had the experience to tell us but Canopus had not been near us for some time. We would ask them …

The Animal Keepers and the Animal Makers called us all together to say that we were dependent on this one species of animal. We had learned – had we not? – how fast and thoroughly species could change … disappear … come into being. What guarantee had we that some new climatic shift might not kill off these new beasts of ours as quickly as the animals of our old time had been killed?

We were all together in one of our newly built places, thick walls around us, the roof heavy above. Very quiet our living had become, where we had been open to every breeze, every change of the light.

In this deep silence we sat together and measured our situation by how our responsibilities had changed.

The Representatives of the Representatives, of whom I was sometimes one, did not change their numbers. We were five, but sometimes we had other tasks as well. There was now one Grain Keeper and Grain Maker. The Fruit and Vegetable Makers had become Animal Makers, as I have suggested. The Food Makers had always been the most necessary of our Makers and Keepers. Next to them, those who built and cared for buildings. The numbers of these had not lessened, but increased. Fifteen of our fifty now concerned themselves with how to shelter our populations in this hard time. There were the Maintainers of the Wall. The others were concerned with the making of implements and artefacts of all kinds, some introduced by Canopus, others developed by us. Not long ago we had one Representative for the Law. Now there were several, because the tensions and difficulties made people quarrel where they had been good-humoured. It had been, before The Ice, a rare thing to have a killing. Now we expected murder. We had not thieved from each other: now it was common. Once civic disobedience had been unknown. Now gangs of mostly young people might roam about throwing sticks and stones at anything that seemed to antagonize them – often the base of the wall.

But this meeting was not concerned with anything but food. It was necessary to discover, or make, or plan, new sources of food.

What had we overlooked, or deliberately left unused? There was our ocean, filled with creatures of all sorts, but even now our sense of the sacredness of the place made us reluctant to look at it as a food source. I have to say that Canopus had never done more than remain silent, when we talked of our Sacred Lake: this was how they dealt with attitudes of ours they expected us to outgrow. There were a few of us who long ago had come privately to think that this sacredness and holiness was foolish, but we talked about our thoughts only with each other. We had learned from Canopus that argument does not teach children, or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

So when some of our band of companions showed signs of emotion at the suggestion that our lake should be examined, we remained silent, as Canopus did at such times.

There remained only what we had turned our backs on and what we so feared: the freezing wilderness. When we had made our observation tours along the wall we had seen that the great birds we so loved to watch had become a snowy white, were no longer brown and grey. Wings soft and feathery and white as some kinds of snow now balanced on those hostile currents. Sometimes we might see a great many birds, but it was hard to pick them out against the snow masses, and often showers or storms filled the air so that birds and snow together whirled about the skies. But they must be feeding on something … If we could not see any creatures on those white wastes, it did not mean they were not there.

It was decided to send a party of us to the cold pole, and I was chosen, because I had been to the other planets and had seen – though not from as close as this – landscapes of the cold. And two of the others had been on similiar journeys. I, Doeg, Memory Maker and Keeper of Records, Klin who had once been our best Fruit Maker, and Marl who had been one of the Keepers of the Herds that had become extinct were the three who had been taken abroad by Canopus, and we were of those who sometimes found our companions overprone to simple emotions, as in the matter of our lake, and we had long been close friends. The other two were young, a boy and girl whose turn had come for apprenticeship. With us, reaching the age of qualifying for apprenticeship had been the occasions of festivals and rejoicing. It meant entry into adulthood. But now, with our once various and always expanding crafts and skills reduced, and with so much of what we had to learn to do difficult and dour and sometimes savage, there was little joy left and too few opportunities, and this journey of ours was seen by all our young as something marvellous: the competition was keen. Such were our fears that we were reluctant to choose the best, but we did in the end choose the best. Their names were Alsi and Nonni and they were brave good children, and they were beautiful. Or, would once have been: as things were, they huddled yellowly, as we did, inside what seemed to us like moving tents of thick clumsiness.

Our trouble was that we were not able to imagine the reality of the savagery of the cold. Not even though we had made brief trips into that region, not even though we searched our memories for anything we had learned of other planets and their means of dealing with extremes.

We put on to little sliding carts supplies of dried meat – which we all hated, though we were hungry enough for it; hide coats in case we lost or spoiled ours; and a sort of tent made of hides. We all thought this small provision would be enough to keep us safe.

We set out in a still morning, sliding down from our wall, not troubling about the steps, which were slippery and dangerous now, and falling into a drift from which we had to struggle. And we had to fight through waist-high feathery snow all that day, so that by nightfall we had not reached our objective: a certain hill in which we believed we would find a cave. Our sun, which seemed feeble enough these days, burned us by reflection and hurt our eyes. All around was white, white, white, and the skies soon filled with white snow masses and the whiteness was a horror and an agony, for nothing in our history as a race, and therefore nothing in our bodies or our minds, was prepared for it. The dark came down when we were in a vast field where the snow was light and soft and spun about and made plumes and eddies. Our tent could not find a hold, but kept sinking as if into water. We huddled together, opening our shaggy coats so as to press our bodies’ warmth into each other, and our arms sheltered each other’s necks and heads. That night there was no snow or storm, so we survived it, though we would not otherwise have done. In the morning we struggled on through the soft suffocating stuff, and then climbed up on to a glacier of hard ice which was so slippery that we made no quicker an advance, though it was better than the thick softness of the snow, into which we were afraid we would vanish altogether. On the ice we slipped and stumbled, but ignored our bruises and our aches, and that night reached the hill in which we knew was a cave. But the entrance to it was a sheet of ice. We were able to put up our tent in a hollow where snow lay. It was made of ten of the largest hides stitched together, with the pelts inwards, and we laid down more hides on the ice, and huddled there till morning. We were not as cold as the night before, but the shaggy fell of the inside of the tent was soaked with the moisture from our bodies and in the morning it was solid ice – stiff rods and points of ice that threatened to cut us as we wriggled out, face down, into the new day, which was clear and free of cloud.

We had begun to understand how little we were prepared for this journey, and I for one wanted to give it up. We three older ones all wanted to turn back, but the two youngsters pleaded with us, and we gave in. We were shamed by them – not so much by their brave and shining eyes, their dauntlessness, but by something more subtle. When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitiful and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn such hardship, had to forgo so much that we, the older ones, had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we felt that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when a species, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in ways that we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and high – even if it is only in potential – to their children. And if there isn’t this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces.

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!’