The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

And when the brief moment of the lament was over, there was silence again, the deep listening silence.

Some of the people waited to see the first creatures being drawn from the water. We had of course seen these often enough, while swimming there. It was while observing them, the long narrow agile water creatures, shaped rather like birds without wings – though some seemed to use frail and small wings – that we had first been inspired to think about how creatures took the shape of their environment, were the visible maps or charts of what they lived in. Birds, both the solitary individualists of our new time, and the lively flocks of the old time, traced for us the currents of the air. And these water beasts, the lone ones, who seemed always to be the larger, and those who moved and swerved and fled about in flocks or crowds or shoals, expressed visibly the currents of the liquid which we could not see, any more than we could the movements of the air. The running, swirling, rolling, and spiralling of air and water would become evident to us as we watched their creatures.

But most of the people made their way home. We Representatives stood on a rise and watched these poor people, our charges, go quickly, almost furtively, as if they were afraid of being watched, or even criticized, into their dwellings. Criticized for what? In times of great calamity, it is unfortunately true that populations feel guilty. Guilty of what? Ah, but what is the use of such rational, such cool, questioning when faced with the sudden, improbable, unexpected afflictions of nature! Our populations felt as if they were being punished … yet they had done no wrong … yet this was what they felt. We had only to look at them to see it – how they moved and stood and searched each other’s faces for confirmation or reassurance. When they stood, it was as if an invisible burden rested on them, making them hunch their shoulders, and giving an obdurate suffering look to the way they held their heads. They huddled together, and they walked glancing about them as if enemies lurked. Yet we had never had enemies. We had not known, until recently, even common crime or criminals. These people, these fortunate happy peoples, so recently blithe and agile and impulsive and trusting of each other and of the earth they lived in and on – they now could not make a gesture or a movement without expressing not only fear, but a wrong – and this was a wrong deep in themselves.

We had discussed how to remedy this: if we should appeal, talk to them, explain, argue, reason … Why should you, our brave and gallant peoples, facing so well and with such courage these hard times that have changed so terribly everything we all knew – why should you look as if you had been condemned to atone for a crime? No crime has been committed! You are not at fault! Please, do not make worse for yourselves and for each other what is already bad enough. Please, think of how this new posture or stance of yours, as if at each moment you expect a judge to pronounce sentence on you, must be undermining you, eating away in all of us, in our deepest beings …

Thus the voice of reason. As we envisaged using it. But did not use it. Reason cannot reach the springs of unreason, to cure or heal them. No, something much deeper in cause and source than we, the Representatives, could come near, was working in our peoples. And of course in us too, for we were of them and in them. Therefore, of necessity, we too were being afflicted, if not at the level we could see so easily in our peoples, then perhaps somewhere deeper and even perhaps worse? How could we know? How could we choose rightly what to do and to say when we had to suspect what was going on in our own minds, had to be wary of our judgment?

What could we conceivably find to say strong enough to outweigh what everybody had to live with day and night: this knowledge that because of events unknown to us, certain movements of the stars (cosmic forces, as Canopus phrased it, though these words did nothing to lessen our bewilderment) were causing our Home Planet, the lovely Planet 8, to wither and die. Nothing we could do or think or say might change this basic truth, and we all had to live with it as we were able, facing perils we did not understand. But, in the future, in some distant time, or perhaps a near time, for we did not know what to expect, Canopus would come and take us all off to Rohanda the fruitful, Rohanda the temperate and the welcoming.

We did go off, we Representatives, to our meeting place, and we sat together, for the rest of that day. Sat mostly in silence. Once we had met in the open air, on a hillside, or at night under stars. Now we sat close together, with our coats kept on, under a low roof. It was very cold. We did not use fires or heating by then: any vegetable matter, or dung, or lichens, or even the earth which can be slowly burned, had to be thought of now in terms of possible feed for animals. We had observed the great herds, in their frenzied search for enough to eat, pawing up this earth that was half vegetable matter and eating it, though they disliked it, and often spat it out. But then they took it up into their mouths again.

When the Representatives who had been floating around the edges of the lake showing the new methods for catching food came in and sat with us, we discussed how best to use this new resource.

I shall simply say here that while the food in the lake did do something to soften our hard lot, it wasn’t much, wasn’t enough. While our populations could not be described as large, compared to those of some planets which we knew were numbered in millions, they were not small enough to be fed long from a moderate-sized lake. And while this food was valued by us, we did not enjoy it. How we hungered and longed for the vegetables and fruits and grains of our old diet … all our food was animal now, unless we scraped lichens from the rocks. We were coarsening because of it, becoming thickset, and with a greasy heavy look, so that it was hard to remember what we had been once. Even our skins seemed to be dulling into the prevailing grey, grey, grey that we could see everywhere. Grey skies, a grey or brownish earth, greyish green covering on the rocks, greyish dun herds, and the great birds overhead grey and brown … though more and more, when they came floating over the wall, which was grey now because of the frost that had it in its grip, they were white … light white feathery floating birds, from the white wastes beyond our barrier wall.

When we looked up at that wall, we could see how the ice had come pressing down and over its top. A dirty greyish white shelf projected from our wall: it was the edge of a glacier. If the wall gave, then what could stand between us and the ice and snow of that interminable winter up there, whose shrieking winds and gales kept us awake at nights, while we huddled together under the mounds of thick hides? But the wall would not give. It could not … Canopus had prescribed it, Canopus had ordered it. Therefore, it would stand …

But where was Canopus?

If we were to be rescued in time for our peoples to be saved, then that time was already past.

I have said that new crimes and violences afflicted us. The victims were not many, but each crime seemed to us an enormity, and appalling, simply because we had not known this before.

It is not easy to allot grief or self-reproach fairly and properly in this business of calamity, when it affects people so variously and insidiously. That the individual victims of a murder or a casual looting made us more uneasy and angry than when twenty people died because of a sudden snowstorm was not reasonable. Was it because we felt we were responsible for the violence, even though there had been no violence or acts of terror before this new time of nature’s cruelty to us? Looked at like that, no one was to blame for these killings, which were, obviously, part of the general worsening of everything. Once any death was a public grief, and a genuine one. We knew each other. It was not possible for a face to be unknown, even if names were.

But the change had begun some time back: when Nonni died in the cold, we did not suffer very much. We were too cold and too threatened ourselves. Alsi mourned for him, but not as she might have done once. No, death had a new quality, and one that made us ashamed. We could not care as once we had … that was the truth of it. Was it that the cold was chilling our hearts, slowing our blood, making us less loving and responsive to each other? A child died, and we all knew we might be thinking secretly: So much the better; what horrors is it going to be spared, this unfortunate one! Almost certainly more fortunate than we the survivors! And we knew we were thinking: One less mouth to feed. And: It would be better if children were not born at all, not in this terrible time. And, as I have already suggested, when a species begins to think like this about its most precious, its original, capacity, that of giving birth, of passing on an inheritance, then it is afflicted indeed. If we are not channels for the future, and if this future is not to be better than we are, better than the present, then what are we?

We knew what we had been: and, as the news came in of riots in another valley, food riots, or perhaps even for no apparent cause, then we looked up into our dreary skies and thought: Canopus, when are you coming, when will you fulfil your promise to us?

then Canopus came, but not as we had expected. A great fleet of her spaceships floated in by way of the warm pole, and landed on our tundras; and what seemed an army of Canopeans unloaded supplies from the ships. We did not at first know what they all were, for we were rejoicing over foodstuffs we had not seen for so long – all kinds of dried and preserved fruits and vegetables. But mostly there were mountains of containers with some sort of pliable substance, and the Canopeans said they were for insulating our dwellings.

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.