The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

Were they not bearers of some other message? Nothing from Johor, for instance? Were we not to be given a time for our being finally rescued?

No, nothing of that kind – the space-fleet had been ordered to bring in these materials, and this is what had been done. And with that, the craft lifted up again into the skies and vanished.

The material for covering our houses was new to us. It was very thick soft easily manipulated stuff, and what we had to do was to make of it shells and hoods and coats for our dwellings. So light was this material that it was easy for a few people to cut, to fit together, and then to lift these shells over the buildings. We debated whether to cut windows in each carapace, but decided not to. For ventilation we had to rely on the opening and shutting of doors. Inside our homes now we crowded in a dark which was lit dimly by electricity that we supplemented when we could by lichen moulds soaked in tallow. Our world was now dark, dark, and always darker as the skies overhead became thicker and greyer. We woke in the stuffy dark that was warmed a little because of the press of bodies, and lit our little glimmers of light, or allowed ourselves the weakest trickle of electricity; and we went out into a world that showed a trace of brightness and light only far down towards the pole, where sometimes there was a little blue. From over the grey wall came driving the snow-laden winds. Now snow flurries played and smoked around the foot of our side of the wall, and tempests were common. And each bout of screaming winds seemed to drive us deeper down against the earth. Not all our buildings had been covered over with the insulating material. In some of our towns were buildings of as many as five or even six layers of function (I am aware of course that this will seem unimpressive to those of you who live on planets where buildings may be as tall as cliffs and mountains. I have seen such buildings myself.) These were too tall for us to be able to cover them over. Some hardy persons had elected to remain in them, but every storm emptied layer after layer, leaving perhaps a few people on the ground layer or on the one above that. And those who had been driven out of their high unprotected dwellings and working places massed together lower down, then were driven by force of numbers into joining families or groups or clans who perhaps had slightly more room than others. Thus adding to the overcrowding … to the tensions … to the always worsening moods and tempers of everybody. Rapidly worsening: having to put the heavy coverings over our living places had seemed to bring us all to a sudden new pitch of explosiveness. From everywhere came the news of the evidences of it.

‘There has been fighting on the other side of the planet.’

‘Fighting? Has someone been killed?’

‘Many. Very many.’

‘Many people have been killed? Why, did so many quarrels break out all at the same time?’

‘You see, groups of people have been fighting.’

‘Fighting against each other? Groups?’

‘Yes, groups, the people of one village fought another.’

‘But what for?’

‘Each village accused the other of the same bad behaviour.’

‘I don’t understand!’

Yes, that is how the news of our first battles was received by us. And this incomprehension persisted.

‘They are fighting between the mountains over there.’

‘Fighting? Who? What for? Have we been invaded, then? Have enemies come from the skies?’

‘No, no, the people in the land just past those foothills, you remember, where our young people used to journey to look for wives and husbands.’

‘How can they be fighting! What about?’

And then it was: ‘They are at war in the next valley.’

‘War?’

‘Yes, the villages there have divided themselves into two factions and are permanently armed against each other.’

‘Has anyone been killed?’

And so it went on. For a long time. Went on even when something of the kind happened among ourselves. Families that had been braving it out on the ground level of one of the unprotected buildings found that snow had covered the apertures; and they emerged and went from one to another of the neighbouring dwellings – and were turned away. Were refused in one place after another. Until they took up weapons of all kinds, stones and sticks, and even the implements used for killing the creatures of the lake, and forced their way into a habitation. There they stayed, a hostile and defensive clan, in one part of the dwelling, setting watchers to report the first sign of hostile retaliation. They slept and cooked food and went about their lives as a unit; and they were in a large room separated from their enemies by a single wall. And these threatened ones came with weapons to throw them out, and did succeed in expelling them. And again the homeless clan went from one place to another, trying to force entrance. Scuffling and fighting went on, all around the different dwellings, in a thick snowfall, which made it hard for them to see who were enemies and who friends. Then when they forced entrance, the invaders and invaded fought in the dimness and the dark of the interior spaces. We Representatives were sent for. The Representative for Housing and Sheltering went in to them, and insisted on the clan breaking itself up into ones and twos, and dispersed them among many households. We had not before had to divide a clan, let alone a family. We all understood this to be a new descent for us into unpleasantness and even danger. For the clan was our basic unit, and we felt it as our strength, our foundation as a people. Yet there was no alternative. We could not build new dwelling places. We did not have the materials. We could only make the best use of those we had.

It was not only the dispersal of some clans that threatened us in a new way. There was almost a rebellion: the clan had obeyed the Representative, but only just. Very easily could they have refused. We did not have the means to enforce our will on others. We had never thought of ourselves as separate from them. We had not envisaged having to make individuals or groups do what they bitterly resisted. Our strength was all in our election by them, to fulfil what we all knew was a general will, a consensus. If there was no agreement we could not function. If this group had said to our Representative: No, we will not! then there was nothing we could have done. It would have been the end of our way of life as a people.

We all knew that. And the fear of general anarchy was what, in the end, made the intruding clan agree to dissolve itself and go quietly off, though not willingly, to new households.

It was a time, still, that soon we would look back on as one of innocence, when we had not known our good fortune.

But our main concern was not for the worsening temper of our people, but for the threat from the ice, which groaned and squealed as the thickening masses bore down towards us, piling up above the wall so that it seemed to us we looked up at a mountain that was moving. We Representatives went together to a place near the wall where there was a gap in the shelf of ice above, and we climbed carefully up steps that were crumbling and dangerous. The surface of the wall was friable, and was cracking minutely into a frosty crumble that we could rub loose under our fingers. But that was only the surface – so we hoped. One of us did slip and fall, almost from the top, but the drifts now were deep, and there was no harm done. The steps opened into a small space between tongues of ice that thrust forward on either side of us, and there we clustered and clung together, for it was hard to stand. And a bitter wind whined around us, spinning small crumbs of white so that all the air was thickened, and we could not see to the horizon. Below us our little town that had once shone whitely among green parks and avenues was now hard to map, for the grey sheltering hoods merged with the tundra so that we were looking down at an agglomeration of humps and protuberances that seemed as if the earth had grown them. Some of the taller buildings stood up sharp and dark, but the upper parts had collapsed in the blizzards, and had a splintered appearance. There were only small movements in the streets; few of the people went out of their dwellings now unless they had to. They had become a passive huddling population, sullen with inactivity, sullenly patient. They were waiting.

They waited for the moment when we would all be swept up and away from our dour frigid land to the paradise of Rohanda. Crouching inside low, dark, ill-smelling buildings, where all effort had become slowed and difficult with the cold, they waited. And, standing high there on that ice cliff above them, we peered through the dim skies and searched for Canopus, for the wonderful spaceships of our Saviour and Maker Canopus.

Where was Canopus? Why did they delay so, and make us wait and suffer and wonder, and doubt our survival? Make us disbelieve in ourselves and in them? What was the reason for it? Yes, they had warned us, and made us prepare ourselves, and they had prescribed our barrier wall, and they had taught us how to change our habits – it seemed sometimes as if this was a change to our very beings, our inner selves – and they had flown in this amazing substance that could clothe towns as if they were people. But we were not saved, not being rescued; and everywhere our peoples degenerated and became thieves and sometimes murderers, and there seemed no end to it all.

We voiced what we were thinking, that shivering morning, up on the ice cliff, we Representatives … fifty of us there were, and every activity or duty or work that we did (that was left to us now) was delineated there, by us. And as we stood there, looking into faces that were only just visible behind deep edges of shaggy fur, we could see the manifold purposes and uses of the old time, where now was –over and over again – Representative for Housing and Sheltering, Representative for Food, Representative for Conserving Warmth. And variations on these basic needs.

For we were keeping, and in a conscious effort, our knowledge of our own possibilities, our potential for the future, which had been so amply demonstrated in the past. We were not merely these shivering animals, concerned only with how to keep ourselves warm, keep ourselves fed – not just what we could see as we huddled there, trying to keep our footing as the wind tugged and shoved at us. No, we were still what we had been, and would be again … and where was Canopus, who would restore us to ourselves?

Again we made the journey around our planet, this time at the foot of the wall or cliff, not on it, as this was no longer possible because of its load of pressing ice. We stumbled through snowdrifts or over frozen earth, and our eyes were turned always to the right, for we kept the sun in front of us as much as we could – our poor weakened pallid sun which seemed now almost to be absorbing heat from us, rather than warming and nurturing us. Our eyes were at work at every moment on the surface of the wall, or cliff, for we feared very much that it would give way altogether. But so far, while every little part of it was crazed and crumbling, there were no large cracks in it. It was holding. This journey took us twice as long as when we had travelled with Canopus, and we were cold and torpid, and felt the need to sleep. Sleep … sleep … our minds found refuge there, and the need to lose ourselves in oblivion was a torment. We would sit pressed together, as soon as the light went, in some place where the snowdrifts were not so deep, with our backs to the great barrier, and we ate our tasteless and disagreeable dried meat, or roots of the half-frozen rushes: and we dozed there as if we were one organism, not many – as if our separate unique individualities had become another burden that had to be shed, like unnecessary movement. Yet we were in movement … alone of our peoples we felt some kind of restlessness, which had made us take this journey. While they dozed and dreamed away this long waiting time heaped together in their dark and frigid homes, we were still feeling a need to press on from place to place, as if elsewhere we could come on something that might aid us.

It was on that journey, while we huddled together as the light went, that one of us – Marl, he who had once been the expert breeder of now extinct animals – did not settle down immediately with the rest of us, but piled a snowdrift higher with his hands, making a windbreak that would save us from some discomfort. Marl had always been a strong and well-built man, and even now was able to move with some lightness and purpose, his movements precise, a pleasure to watch. We were watching: saw in that face, thinned as all our faces were, a concentration and an effort that brought us all up again to our feet – to determination, to self-discipline. And that night and the succeeding nights we all built walls, which grew higher, so that we sheltered deep inside a circle of piled snow that grew inwards at its top; and soon we spent our nights inside domes of packed snow. These on calmer nights remained firm above and around us, but when the blizzards came they blew away into the storm. And so we learned to pack the snow hard into massive pieces and piled them up; and knew that we had found a way of making some kind of dwelling for our homeless ones, who could not any longer stay in the tall buildings, and who were so unwelcome in the overcrowded households. Masson, the chief of the Representatives for Housing and Sheltering, was at work throughout the journey, mostly with Marl, packing snow this, way and that way, using chunks of ice as strengtheners, experimenting with apertures and placing them high and low – finally making short tunnels that we crept along into the snowhouses, so that our bodies’ heat would not be wasted.

So that journey accomplished more than only making sure our wall still stood firm and whole. And we were reminded that effort of one kind often brings as a reward accomplishments and knowledge that have not been envisaged at all. And we returned to our various hometowns and settlements with the determination to rouse our torpid peoples to effort – effort almost of any sort.

I, and Marl, and Klin, he who had once brought into being so many delightful varieties of fruit, and the girl Alsi, went around and about and in and out of dwellings and households, exhorting and talking, and pleading.

How many times did I enter a dark building, where a small glow of light lit up what seemed like a herd of beasts asleep on the floor. But they were our people, deep inside the animal pelts; and faces lifted unwillingly from under covering arms, or out of hoods of fur, and eyes watched me as I strode about, trying to impress on them that vigorous movement was indeed still possible. The eyes moved slowly, their gleam being extinguished at every moment as sleep closed them, then I saw them glitter again … it was like coming at dusk on a hillside where a herd of our great beasts had lain down to rest and, seeing us come near, they lifted their heads and stared, wondering if this time we were a danger, and then, deciding not, the shine of many pairs of eyes vanished as they turned away the great heavily horned heads. Oh, it was so stuffy and unpleasant in our dwellings now! How I disliked having to make my way into them, and stand there, trying to look alert and awake, when the foetid atmosphere, the general torpor, the cold, dulled my mind and made me want only to lie down with them all and sleep away my life – until Canopus came.

‘Is Canopus here yet?’ – I heard, everywhere, from these dark smelly interiors, and this anxious needy cry seemed to ring in my ears all the time as I went about my work.

We had managed to arouse enough young and strong people to extend the sheds and runs where Alsi was breeding the snow animals. These covered a large area near our town; and the system Alsi had worked out was in operation in all our towns. Being creatures of the cold, they did not need much shelter. We provided for them something like the caves which we believed were their original breeding places, made out of rock and piled with lichens and moss. The animals were kept in bounds by walls of the half-frozen earth of the tundra. They were now as important a source of food as the herds of great beasts. Feeding them was a problem we did not expect to solve. Vegetable matter of some sort was what they had to have, and their need for it competed with ours. They had learned to accept a diet of lichens, mosses, and the new kinds of low-growing tough plants that now were the planet’s chief vegetation. But these were what we too were eating, made into broths and stews of all kinds, when we could not stand for one more minute the monotony of meat. But what these animals gave us was meat – again meat; but at least, because they seemed to thrive on so little, the return from them was greater than if we ate the lichens and the bitter woody plants.

To breed them was economic, was sensible. But we did not like them. Had no affection for them.

In captivity they had become clumsy, slow-moving animals, their whiteness dimmed by the necessary and inevitable dirt of their pens and caves. I often stood there beside Alsi, to watch them. She, this most capable and inventive tender of animals, did not like her work. She wore, often enough, a rueful sort of grimace on that pleasant broad face of hers; and her eyes that shone out of the deep hood of fur had an apology in them. For what? I knew, well enough! So did we all. When Alsi, Klin, or Marl, or myself, had about us a certain look of deprecation, defensiveness, it was because we did not like what we had to do!

Imprisonment had changed, too, the nature of these creatures: they were unlikeable and unresponsive, and their bright expressionless blue eyes stared back at us from the soiled white faces. But in her own quarters, which she shared with brothers and a sister, Alsi had two of these little creatures as pets. And there they played and bounded about, and were delightfully affectionate. They greeted the approach of any one of us with little trills of pleasure, and they loved to nestle close or to creep into the folds of a coat or a scarf, where they lay blinking soft blue eyes that were all mischief and friendliness. Such was the real nature of the beasts we had made unpleasant prisoners.

Sometimes I went out by myself when there was soft snow falling, and stood quite still, and soon I saw a gentle darting movement which was not the blowing or settling of the snowflakes. If I stared long enough, my eyes attuned to what I hoped to see, this subtle shadowy movement took shape, and I was looking at the little snow animals, wild ones, that seemed to lift, and settle, and then run through the white fall, and then float up among the snow. Yes, I have seen that: how they ran and were airborne, sometimes for long distances, as if they were birds using air currents. And they alighted more softly than birds; and then a white plumy shape came into vision again quite high above the ground, at the level of my own gaze. For the flash of a moment blue alert friendly eyes shone into mine, and then there was a fast turning movement, like that of a water creature, and the white soft thing was floating away among the white blowing feathery particles. And I had met Alsi out there, doing the same: refreshing ourselves with this delightfulness, this soft delicious play in the snow – reminding ourselves of the real nature of the poor animals whom we had deprived. But what did they live on? There were few droppings from the great birds who lived on them, and these were usually covered over almost at once by fresh snowfalls. The lichens on the rocks and the plants had to be dug out by us from under snow. We came to believe, Alsi and I, that these creatures were nourished by snow; or, if we did not believe it, we enjoyed playing with the idea, making for ourselves a small place in our minds where fantasy and improbability could be enjoyed; and this was a resting place and a restorative for us, living as we did amidst a grinding necessity that narrowed us and pressed us down.

And then Canopus did come to us. Canopus came at last. It was Johor who came, but what I saw first was a tall figure in thick clothes standing not far from the pens and caves of our snow animals, looking into our town, with an alertness and interest that made me say at once, That is a stranger. For animation of any kind at all had to strike me as unusual. Then he turned his head towards me, and I saw his brown healthy face, already greying because of the crumbs of snow on his skin and his eyebrows, and I said: ‘Johor!’ And he said: ‘Doeg!’

By then I was sleeping in a snow dome, or snow hut, thus relieving the pressure on space for others, but it was not a place I spent time in unless for sleep. Johor said: ‘Oh, it is cold! Where can we go?’

There was a long low shed near the animals’ pens that Alsi used to store food and bedding for them, and I said: ‘In there …’ And already I was feeling that my strong expectations for release were about to be killed dead, for there was nothing in his manner that signalled to me: Yes, now it is all over, your ordeal is over, and you are about to be set free. On the contrary, there was a stricture in his manner, a holding back, and an expression in his eyes that I recognized. For I saw it often enough, among ourselves, among us Representatives. He was feeling that pressure of patience that is born from watching others suffer, knowing that nothing one may say will alter the suffering, knowing that you yourself are a part of what they experience as pain. For of course we, the Representatives, making decisions, all of which had to be difficult and with oppressive results, were felt, by the people, as burdensome. It was we who said: ‘No, not yet.’ Who said: ‘Wait.’ Said: ‘Do not sleep in all day in your dark rooms, but rouse yourselves, work, do anything – no, bear the burden of your consciousness, your knowledge, do not lose it in sleep.’ Said: ‘So it is and thus it must be – at least, for a time.’ And this was nothing to do with us as individuals, for whoever they chose to represent them in this or that function, must say: ‘No.’ And: ‘This is all there is.’ And: ‘You must do without.’

So what I saw in Johor’s eyes was what I saw every day; and what I knew others saw in mine. I knew already that there were no fleets of rescue ships waiting somewhere just out of my line of sight on the tundra. I knew he had come to us alone.

I asked, knowing what he would say: ‘Your Space Traveller?’

He said gently: ‘I have sent it away. I shall be with you for – quite a little time.’

I turned my face well away from him, knowing that he could not see it inside the deep fur, for I could not hide then what I felt.

We went into the shed. It was a long low place, with openings along one wall that led into the runs of the animals where food could be pushed in. Sacks of springy tough plants from the tundra were piled up and the smell from them was sharp and pleasant. I sat on one, enjoying the freshness, and Johor sat near. He brought out from his pockets some small red fruits, which I had not seen, and he held them out towards me on his palm. My hands went out to them as if I was going to grab and snatch, and, seeing my hands do this, I could not help shuddering at myself, and turning my face away. That gesture, which I could not help, said clearly enough what we all were now, what we had come to, and of course Johor had taken in its meaning.