‘Go on from there, Alsi. Remember what happened when you did get home, and when you had told your tale and the people who had listened had turned their attention to something else? Can you remember how …’
But I did not hear any more of Alsi’s efforts with memory, for the door opened in a screech of wind and a messenger came in, from Bratch for me: my aid was needed. I was to become Bratch for a time, as Alsi had become Doeg, and I went out into the wind that was coming straight down from the lands above our wall in a continuous driving squall.
I stumbled through the loose drifts, holding on to the young woman who had come to fetch me, as she clung to me, and in this way we forced our way out beyond the edges of our town and into the empty tundra where nothing could be seen but the driving snow, and so, slowly and painfully, towards the next town.
By the time we reached there, the blizzard had ceased. This town when we came on it was near obliterated, the snows had been so heavy. We pushed our way through the thick loose choking snow, well above the level of the first layer of windows where, in some places, we could see movements and pushings as if creatures were everywhere struggling out of eggs. We came to a building where the snow was smooth and thick to the height of the first ceiling, but there was a tunnel excavated down to the door, and we went down that, into a room used for meetings and discussions, and now filled with people who were sitting – not lying in that half-death of lethargic sleep – and waiting for me and for others from near towns. For there was a new danger, which soon I saw for myself, for the whole company of us went out into a morning where a cold and pale sun shone distantly in a pale hazy sky. But our eyes were not directed upwards to this rare enough sight – sun, in an unclouded sky – but on the wall that ran just beyond the edge of this town. Above it reared the familiar savage crests and shelves of ice; but the wall itself was cracked from top to bottom, black on white, for the inside of the wall had not yet frosted and dimmed. That sharp bright black astonished our eyes, and we stood staring, and as we did the crack widened, in a groan, and chips of ice flew everywhere, even threatening our poor exposed faces, and clouds of snow fell from the top of the wall. And suddenly the wall itself bulged, and then the upper part of it was crushed under the awful weight of the ice above, and fell almost to where we stood, and the ice sheets protruded forward and ground down the wall still further – and then we were standing in the little central square of the town, with the glacier coming right into it. The wall at that place did not exist – had gone.
We all knew what would happen, and what the danger to our people was: for before they had sent for me and for the others who would become Bratch for a time, they had already been into all the dwellings of the town, urging the inhabitants to come out, and to make new plans for themselves, to move away from this now dangerous wall. But they would not move, could not be made to rouse themselves. The stores of stimulant frozen water, with the flowers and leaves shining in it, were neglected, and in any case only the few already active ones had made use of them.
We had to make them all wake up and come out of the dark caves their dwellings now were, and to think how to make new shelters, and quickly, for we could hear the groaning and screaming of the ice as it pushed and slid above us towards the weak place in our wall, which was collapsing fast and faster on either side of the gap that was now filled completely with ice.
Our problem, worse than how to get new shelters built, was the fear in our minds. For something new, and impossible and deadly had happened – Canopus had been wrong, had said something which had then been cancelled, negated. The wall, our wall, which had absorbed so much of our strength and our substance, which was there because of Canopus – and which was built exactly according to the minutest prescriptions of Canopus – was breached, was down, and if in this place, then it was almost certainly down in other places, which we had not yet heard about – and probably would not, since travel now was so difficult and slow. The wall had been there to save us from the ice, and this was because Canopus would come and take us all away to the lovely Rohanda, our paradise, whose mother star we had often sought out in the sky, and then admired with our eyes and with our minds. But the wall was not going to save us … and Canopus, in the shape of Johor, a half-starved, half-frozen creature like ourselves, sat in a heap of dirty heavy hides in a shed, talking to poor Alsi, who was being Doeg – but why, what for, why, why, why – why was he troubling at all? – that was what had to be in our minds, then, as we stood looking up at where the ice had pushed our invulnerable, unconquerable wall over and down. If the wall had gone down under the onslaughts of the ice, then Canopus had made a mistake, and that meant … and those among us, Representatives and the represented, who had been talking – though less and less – about paradises and rescue and the fleets of spaceships which would soon, very soon, arrive and whisk us all away, fell silent, no longer spoke of rescue … yet, in spite of the despondency and despair which every one of us now felt, and knew we all felt, it was necessary to confer, to measure our situation, and to rouse those slumbrous dazed ones who could not or would not rouse themselves. But what for? In our hearts now we all knew, every one, that they would be roused and stimulated – if we could achieve this – to no end, for the space-fleets would not be coming. Yet Canopus wanted this. Johor said this most clearly and definitely. As long as it was possible, he wanted every individual up and alert, instead of drowsy and unconscious. And while we could see no sense in it, even a sort of cruelty, since the sleep and the lethargy were for protection, and because the people did not want to face what was happening – we had to do what he wanted. What Canopus wanted …
We, the alert among us, left the central place in the town which was being so horribly threatened by the glacier, and went back into the space under the snows, and we sat there, eating our little ration of dried meat, and we thought of how to get everyone awake and working. We had no resources but the small stores of ice that had the principle of the summer plant in it, and since that was all we could think of, knowing that exhortations on the lines of ‘Canopus says …’ were now useless, we set ourselves to chipping the blocks of ice into smaller and smaller pieces. These we piled on to trays, and a piled tray was carried by a team into every one of the dark odorous caves under the snows. I, carrying this desperate medicine – I, as Bratch – went into a room with others, who were Bratch, and we aroused the sleepers, and, as each one groaned awake, an arm across eyes unaccustomed now even to the little glimmer of light we brought in with us from the pallid outdoors, we held them up, and pushed the ice chips into their mouths and made sure the water was swallowed. And as animation came into their faces, and their struggles against us became stronger, we hauled them up, and pushed them up steps, and then up through the snow masses that covered the dwellings, into the central place of the town where the ice-tongue was protruding. Crowds of these poor wretches stood blinking there, up at the collapsed wall – which could not collapse, since Canopus had ordered it, but had collapsed – and then at how the glacier inched forward. They stared, and turned their heads listlessly about – for the animation the water had fed into them was not much – and most showed signs of wanting to stumble back under the snow into their sleep again. How strong is that deep, dark drive towards sleep, towards death, towards annihilation; how terribly, fearfully strong it is, and in every one of us – for I have felt it, as they did. I have lain drugged by my own indifference under the piled hides, and was saved only because others shook me awake and fought with me and made me struggle up into the cold light. To get them to move then, and to stand long enough for the active principle of the liquid to sting all their tissues awake – this was what we had to do, and we did, though we were using all our strength, physical and moral, to keep them from going back and down into the dark. We fought with them, and soon teams of them were at work dragging, on sledges and on anything that would slide over the snow, shovels and spades and the dried meats and the hides, out of that town, well clear of it, where we could bu
ild some shelters with the snow itself, for there was nothing else. The listlessness of them! – the dulled confusion! – their indifference! We had to fight, and exhort, and support. Long lines of its inhabitants stumbled away from their town, kept up this heavy staggering movement until night came and with it another blizzard. But we made them move on, and in the morning it was a clear day, not snowing, though the clouds were low and fast and thick over us, and again we walked through the day, and that night we were aided by a sky where we saw, very faint and distant and often obscured by cloud, some stars. And these encouraged us, and kept us moving. Next day, being at what we judged a safe distance, we made little houses of piled snow and blocks of ice, each one approached by a long tunnel through which one had to crawl. And in each were piles of hides, and small glimmering lights made of tallow from the herds, and stores of dried meats. And into each went four or five or more people, collapsing back at once into their lethargy, for the effect of the stimulant was wearing off. They were alive: were safe – for a time. For as long as was necessary … necessary for what? And the teams of us, of Bratch, made sure that in each shelter was one more energetic and lively than the others, though that was not saying much; and laid upon each the responsibility of seeing that the inhabitants of the snowhouses must be awake part of the time, must not be allowed to slide into the last sleep of all. Must not, must not – and when their eyes searched ours, with Why, what is the use? we put into our own eyes assurance and confidence we did not feel – for we did not feel ourselves able to say: Because Canopus says so.
And leaving this little settlement half buried in snow, we went off into the town nearest this on the side away from that where Johor still sat listening to Alsi as Doeg; and found there that the wall was holding, though the ice was rearing up over it so fearfully that it could not hold long. And again we started on the wearing dragging painful business of rousing people up, and making them move out, and build themselves shelter.
And when that town was evacuated and the people ‘safe’ – as far as was possible – we went to the next … and the next … where we met Bratch again, Bratch the physician, at the work of rousing and reassuring, for all along the wall black cracks had appeared, and then the wall had collapsed and the ice had come pushing through, and people were being moved out of their towns farther away from the lands of the ice above the wall. And so we all laboured, teams of us, very many of us: we, Bratch, worked at saving minds and bodies. And there was not one of us who did not ask silently and secretly: Why? What for? Since these people will die here, in their snow huts, and only a little later than they would if they had been left in their own places and towns. For it is only we, the Representatives, that will be saved … but this thought, I could see, did not take root in them, the Representatives, just as, in me, it could not find a home, but was rejected, presenting itself back to my conscious thought as something refused. No, it was not a lack of justice that we rejected – that we, the few, should be saved when the others would not be, but would be entombed in a planet of ice – for justice is something not so easily understood. It was, quite simply, that there was something in the substance of the thought, in its texture and quality, that could not find acceptance in our minds. In our new minds – for we understood that everything in us was new, being new-made, new-worked, changed. While we laboured and fought and exhorted and forced the doomed wretches up and out of their saving kindly lethargy, we were being changed, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. And in the unimaginably vast spaces between the particles of the particles of the particles of the electrons and neutrons and protons – between the particles that danced and flowed and vibrated? Yes, in these faint webs or lattices or grids of pulses, changes went on over which we had no control. Which we could not chart or measure. Thoughts – but where were they, in the empty spaces of our beings? – that once we had regarded tolerantly, or with approval, as necessary, were now being rejected by what we had become.
When we had shepherded the people of yet another town, or city, or village out and away from the deadly wall which the ice was crushing, and into the white wilderness where only tiny ice huts sheltered them from the blizzards, and where they would be engulfed, sooner or later – then we were not able to see that our situation was any different from theirs. Both kinds of us, the people of Planet 8, the represented and the Representative – endured. The thought in our minds was that they were being changed by what we were forced to do; that we were being changed by their being made to stay alive when they would so very much rather have drifted away from our common effort into death.
So we employed ourselves, we, the Representatives, who were sometimes Bratch the physician, and sometimes Zdanye, those who sheltered and protected – for we did not think that we might properly use the word Masson, the builder, in connection with this work we did, of causing little huts of snow and ice to be made. Yet we did wonder if, in a world of only snow and ice – for we could believe that in the vastnesses of our galaxy such planets existed – whether the inhabitants could come to live with contentment, not knowing better. Those of us who had been taken to other planets in the course of our education as Representatives had seen such variety, such extremes, such unexpectedness, that we could believe there were beings who rejoiced in their icy worlds, as we had done once in the sunlit and favoured lands of our planet, where if cold winds blew this was enough of an event to make tales of it for our children. Yes, I could remember Doeg – my parents, older people, travellers – beginning a chronicle with, ‘And so, my friends, you must imagine that on that day a very cold wind came fast across the sky, blowing the clouds together and apart, blew so strongly across our ocean that there were waves the height of small hills – yes, it is true, it was so. And then …’ And the thoughtful eyes of the young people …
While we were engaged in this work of moving the people, news came that our ocean – our little lake – was freezing so deep that it was no longer easy to find in it what food remained there. I went with some others, as Rivalin the Lake Guardians, through long slow snowfalls, which lessened as we went down and away from the middle lands until we were in a grey wilderness of hills and valleys, with the lake a white hard gleam, and we averted our eyes from it as much as we could, for white, white, white had again filled our minds and sight till we felt our thoughts were being blinded by its neverendingness. Yes, even these greys and the frosted rocks, and the soil that was brown and speckled with white crystals, were a rest to us; and so we came stumbling to the lake where we could see, far out in its centre, a small dark crowding activity, a bustle, which had about it a frantic urgency, and we walked out on the slippery ice, without thinking that we had never done this before, until we saw that a large hole had been cut in the ice, the size of a pond, black rocking sloshing water in a rigid white casing, and on this balanced most dangerously small boats that had lines and nets over their sides. All around this hole, whose sides were more than the height of the tallest among us, stood those whose task it was to break up the ice as the water kept thickening, and making a skin, and then flakes, and then thin sheets of ice. But the water was freezing faster than it was possible to break up the crust.
From the boats sparse loads of sea creatures were shovelled up on to the ice, and dragged away on sledges. Very thin supplies these were – the last of our food from our ocean. And I saw how some took up these still wriggling little water-things, which were fighting for their lives in the freezing air, and bit into them when hunger for freshness overcame them and overrode everything that was in them of restraint and abstention. I, too, was filled with a gnawing painful need for this food, and I felt myself being drawn across the ice to the edges of the pond, my hands out, my mouth filled with need, already tasting the crunching salty freshness – but I was brought to a halt before I took one up off the ice and bit into it. And others too, like myself, stumbled towards the food, but stopped, and we were all thinking of those starving in their ice houses, or going about their work, starving.
But w
hat lay about us on the ice verges was not going to keep life in more than a few for a very short time – and, as we stood there, the sky came low in a smother of white, the snow began to fall, whitening the black of the water, and then there was no black, but a whirling black-and-grey, and, very soon, the water hole, or pond, was crusted over, and the boats were held fast. The people working in the boats were just visible as they put their feet out over the edges, to test the new ice, and stood on it, and then ran quickly across it, for it bent and squeaked under them, to the edges where they had to jump up again and again till their hands could find a hold on the ice cliffs, and we could haul them up. And there we all stood, for the last time as Rivalin the Custodians of the Lake, there we stood a long time, thinking of our sacred waters, under the ice, and what few creatures remained there sealed in, with the suffocating cold above them, and the white coming lower and lower, cramming them down and pushing them into the muddy bottom, and killing them as all their waters froze.