The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  And so it was with all of us, Johor with the Representatives, sitting there on our cold hillside, while the snow fell, it fell, it fell, so that we sat to our waists in light loose snow, and then the white pall was up to our shoulders – and first one, then another, rose slowly up out of the white as if out of water, shaking flakes and crumbs and clots of snow everywhere, and soon we were all standing, with the white drift up to our mid-thighs, and still the snow fell, it was falling with no signs of any end to it at all. We stood facing in to each other, looking into each other’s eyes. There was not one word of Canopus, or of rescues – all that way of thinking seemed to us to belong to some distant childishness, and we could hardly remember, between the lot of us, how we had been in those days of our juvenescence, and now our thoughts were of a very different necessity. Then we turned ourselves so that we all, every one, faced away from the southern extremity of our planet, marked by the slim black shining column which, however, was beginning now to grey over with frost, so that soon it would hardly be visible where it stood amid the heaping drifts and flying clouds of snow. Our faces were to the north, and we began to move in unison, as if there was no other thing that could be done, as if what we had to do was ordained for us, and inevitable – we, like the empty and starving herds before us, were heading up into the realms of the winter; but it was a winter that would soon have covered everything, claimed everything, and our little planet would be swinging there in space, all white and glittering while the sun and the stars shone on it, and then, being all frozen over, with nothing left on it that had been living – what new processes would begin, once the processes of freezing had been acomplished? For nothing can be static and steady and permanent, it could not possibly be that our little world would spin there in space, unaltering, a planet of snow and ice: no, it would go on, gathering more to itself as a snowball does when travelling, or change into something else entirely, become a world we could not begin to imagine, with our senses tuned as they were to Planet 8 – and not even this Planet 8, the freezing one, but the old and delightful world of the time before The Ice … no, changes we could not begin to imagine would – must – come to this home of ours, but they would be of no concern to us, for we would not be here.

  We moved on, slowly, with our faces to the freezing winds that came down on us, came pitilessly, not ceasing at all, day or night; we went on cold, empty, as insubstantial inside our thick coats as if we were already bones and bits of dried tendon and skin. And Johor was with us, one of us, and his eyes looked back at us, from between the shaggy fringes of his hood, with the same hollow and painful and peering way we all had to use – for the snow glare was in our eyes, and in our minds, and there was no way of shutting it out and finding a soft and companionable darkness where we could rest; for even when the dark did come down, there was so much of the snow-light in us we could not shut our lids, they would not stay shut, but flew open, as if we had the snow and ice inside us as well as out, and our eyes were windows that looked both ways on to landscapes of white, white, a flat hard white.

  Half blinded, deaf with the perpetually screaming winds, numbed, dying, we stumbled past the snow huts and sheds we had built for the populations to take refuge in from the advancing glaciers – and did not look inside, for we knew what we would find. As we went through this zone, it was evident that soon the little excrescences of snow and ice, small rounds and bumps among the drifts, would have gone under the white, for already some were gone, quite covered over. And, looking back from the mountain passes that led up into the parts of the planet that had been so thronged with people, we could not see now where these ice settlements were – or had been, for the storms were so thick between us and them. We went on, the few of us, looking out as we went for our old towns, but the glaciers had come down over them, we could not see any sign of settlements or cities, though once we did go struggling past a room sticking up out of the snow, that had square apertures all around, and, in it, some sticks and bits that had been furniture but had been pulverized by the cold. This room was the very top of a tall building, and we were advancing past it at a level where once only the great solitary birds of the age of the cold had swung and circled. And, when we looked ahead of us for something like an escarpment or a cliff, there was nothing at all: the ice pushing down from above the wall had brought it all crashing and crumbling down, and in any case it was now a long way beneath where we travelled over the crests and billows of the snow. So we crossed over that famous wall of ours, the impregnable, the unbreachable, the impervious: the wall that would stand there forever between us and disaster, until Canopus would come with her shining fleets. We crossed it without knowing when we did, and were in a landscape where there were no mountains or hills, unless, they were of ice or piled snow, for all the natural unevennesses of the terrain had been buried.

  It is not true to say that we travelled easily, for we laboured and stumbled and dragged ourselves forward – but this was not because we contended with inclines and descents of mountains and valleys. Yet it was such long hard dragging work. There was nothing left of us! We were as empty as if scoured inside with wind as well as out. We were truly nothing but skin and bone and our poor hearts thumped sluggishly and irregularly, trying to move the thick blood through our drying veins and arteries. We were half dead, and how hard it was to shift forward these desiccating carcasses even a few steps at a time.

  How heavy we were – how very very heavy … The drag on every particle of our bodies of the gravity of the spin of the planet was as if we were being held fast by it, and not merely by the thicknesses of the snow. Heavy, heavy, heavy – was the pull of our mortality; even though we were all as transparent as shadows and the flesh on our bones had long since dwindled down and gone. Heavy, the shuffling steps we took, one after another, making ourselves, forcing ourselves to move, our wills hammering there in the painful efforts of our hearts: Move … move … move … yes, that’s it … take one more step – yes, that’s it … and now another … yes, and now just one more … move … and keep moving … and so it was with every one of us, dragging ourselves there, among the clouds of snow that hung so low over the snowdrifts it was hard to tell what was air and what had already fallen from the air. We were half-ghosts, half gone, and yet so heavy we could feel the weight of us depending on the substance of our wills, hanging there, dragging – and what was this thing, will, that kept us moving up and on, into the high passes of snow, towards the other pole, the far extremity of our planet? In and through and among these bundles of bones and skin and already desiccated tissues, burned something else, will – and where was it, that pulse or pull in the vast spaces that lie between the minute pull or pulses that make up the atom?

  Heavy, heavy, oh so heavy, we dragged and pushed ourselves; we waded and seemed to swim, up and up and through, and at nights we rested together, poor wraiths, while the winds shrieked or the stars talked overhead. When we reached where we knew must be the gorge where Nonni had slipped, there was a clear fresh sweep of white, and the caves we had sheltered in were buried and gone; and when we came to the high valley between the ringing peaks where we had crouched to stare at the glitter of the stars and heard them rustle and sing, what we saw were the little tips of the mountains, hillocks merely, and if we had not known mountains were there, could not have guessed that they stood so tall and sharp. We made a stop there, as dark fell, in a hollow at the top of one of the small hills; and the winds rose screaming and we felt the snow thud and push and whirl all round us – and in the morning there was the most marvellous sight. For we were huddled between rocks on the summit of a great mountain – the winds had in the night cleared the valley of loose snow, so that we saw it as we had on our previous visit here, emptied. The winds had a pattern and a movement that filled this valley to the top, and then swept it: all over the planet the snow masses were moved about, piled high and then blasted away again, heaped up and then whisked off by gales to be dumped somewhere else. We looked down at a glassy glitterin
g icy place many days’ walking across and very deep, between enormous icy black peaks. All we looked at had a glassy awfulness that hurt into our dying eyes; and as we peered down over the edge of the miniature valley we were stranded in at the top of the mountain peak, we knew we would never leave it. How could we, weak as we were, descend the ghastly precipices of that peak? And so, for the last time with our old eyes, we sat close and looked into each other’s faces, until, one after another, our faces shuttered themselves in death, and our bundles of bones settled inside the heaps of our shag-skin coats, so that, as we slid away from that scene, and saw it with eyes we had not known we possessed, all we could see was what looked like a herd of beasts crouched in sleep or in death high up there on a mountaintop.

  We went on together, light now, so buoyant and easy in moving that it was with disbelief and with horror we thought back to our so recent dreadful heaviness, the old weight of us, each step or lurch forward against the pull and the drag that held every tiniest atom in a lock. Our new eyes had no steady perspective. We went floating onwards, free and light, and when we looked back for orientation at the carcasses we had inhabited, we saw only that we were among throngs of the most marvellous intricate structures and shapes: glittering crystals surrounded us, all different, each a marvel of subtlety and balance, each a thing we could have stayed to contemplate and wonder over … yet there were myriads of them, they came floating and drifting all about us, and, as our eyes kept changing their capacity, sometimes these crystals seemed enormous, as large as we were, and sometimes small. It was not at once that we understood that these multitudes of infinitely various shapes were snowflakes; that were, or had recently been, our enemy: it was by the agency of such loveliness that our little planet had slowly been done to death. But we had not suspected it, had not known when we stretched out a hand to let a white flake settle there, so that we might show it to our children: ‘See? That is snow! That is the water vapour that is always in the air around us in a new shape’ – had never thought that this little crumb, or froth of white, might be seen thus, as a conglomeration of structures so remarkable that one might examine them with admiration that could never wear out. Floating through them, feeling ourselves to change shape and size constantly, we tried to stay our movement, so that we could take our fill of gazing at these miracles, but that scene dissolved and went, the crystal structures vanished, for they belonged to some sphere or realm that we had passed through. Now, when we looked back to that huddle of bodies under their piles of dirty skins, to see how far we had travelled from that mountain peak, we saw them as webs and veils of light, saw the frail lattice of the atomic structure, saw the vast space that had been what in fact we mostly were – though we had not had eyes to comprehend that, even if our minds knew the truth. But the little dazzle or dance we looked at, the fabric of the atomic structure, dissolved as we watched: yes, we saw how those old bodies of ours inside their loads of hide were losing their shapes, how the atoms and the molecules were losing their associations with each other, and were melding with the substance of the mountain. Yes, what we were seeing now with our new eyes was that all the planet had become a fine frail web or lattice, with the spaces held there between the patterns of the atoms. But what new eyes were these that could see our old home thus, as interlocking structures of atoms, and where were we, the Representatives – what were we, and how did we seem to those who could watch us, with their keener finer sight? For, certainly as we changed eyes and ways of seeing so that every moment it seemed that we inhabited a different world, or zone, or reality, it must be that others could watch us, see us – but see what? If we had lost our old shapes, which had already disintegrated and gone into the substance of mountain and snow and wind and rock, lost those faint webs or veils or templates that had been more space than substance – if we had lost what we had been, then we were still something, and moved on together, a group of individuals, yet a unity, and had to be, must be, patterns of matter, matter of a kind, since everything is – webs of matter or substance or something tangible, though sliding and intermingling and always becoming smaller and smaller – matter, a substance, for we were recognizing ourselves as existent; we were feelings, and thought, and will. These were the web and the woof and the warp of our new being, though in our old being there had seemed no home or place for them, and we had imagined how love and hate and the rest had howled and swept and pulsed about in the vast spaces that lie between the core of an atom (if anything that dissolves as you think of it may be termed a core) and the particles that surround it (if a vibration and a flow may be called a particle) – and these feelings and thoughts made up our new selves, or self, and our minds were telling us that we were still a tenuous though strict dance, just as our old minds had told us what we were, though we had not had eyes to see what we were. Once, before we became dead beasts lying frozen on a mountaintop, these layers or veils fitted into each other, had been a whole, had functioned together – but now one pattern had already sunk back into the physical substance of Planet 8, and another went forward, our eyes changing with every moment so that we were continually part of a new scene, or time. Nor were we something already fixed, with an entity that could not be changed, for we came upon a ghost or a feeling or a flavour that we named Nonni: a faintly glittering creature or shape or dance that had been, we knew, Nonni, the dead boy, Alsi’s companion, and this entity or being came to us, and married with us, with our new substance, and we all went on as one, but separate, in our journey towards the pole.

  Who went? And what was our name?

  The teacher of children was there; and the guardian of the waters; the maker and creator of grains and fruits and plants; the keeper and breeder of animals; the storyteller who continually makes and re-makes the memories of populations; the tender of the very small and vulnerable; the healer – the discoverer of medicines and remedies; the traveller who visits planets so that knowledge may not be imprisoned and unshared – all these were there, among us and of us; all our functions and the capacities of our work were in the substance of these new beings, this Being, we now were – Johor with and of us, Johor mingled with us, the Representative of Canopus part of the Representative of Planet 8, the destroyed one – destroyed at least for our purposes – for who could say how this lump of ice spinning in the spaces of the heavens would modify itself, becoming gas perhaps, on its way back to soil and a shape and substance that would be recognizable to the eyes we once had owned.

  The Representative swept on and up, like a shoal of fishes or a flock of birds; one, but a conglomerate of individuals – each with its little thoughts and feelings, but these shared with the others, tides of thought, of feeling, moving in and out and around, making the several one.

  What were we seeing there, feeling there – and where? In what place or time were we, then: what were we, and when? We did not see wastes of snow or ice, no, but a perpetual shifting and changing – we were seeing our planet in a myriad guises, or possibilities. We saw it in a flash or a glimpse as it had been, our warm and lovely place where everything had blessed us, and beside this brief vision, a thousand variations of the same, each slightly different, so that each one, had we seen it by itself, could have been judged by us as a stage in the development of our planet – but seen thus, merging so fast, and so subtly different, we knew that what we saw were possibilities, what could have been, but had not been, not in our space and time. But had been elsewhere? Yes, that was it, we were observing how, behind or beside or beyond – at any rate, some where or when – the various stages of development of our planet, had been so many others, the possibilities that had not been given actuality in the level of existence we had known, had experienced; but hovered just behind the veil, potentials, what might have been or could have been … Myriads there were, the unachieved possibilities; but each real and functioning on its own level – where and when and how? – each world every bit as valid and valuable as what we had known as real. Just as once, I, Doeg, had stood in front of mirrors
in my old self and seen stretching out in an interminable line of possibilities, all the variations in the genetic storehouse made visible – sometimes so similar to what I was that I could hardly tell the difference, but then more and more of me, each a variation, and a variation farther away from what ‘I’ was – each one the possible and potential housing of this feeling of me, Doeg, some easily recognizable to my fellows as I, Doeg, and others so wildly distant that only a turn of the head or the slightest familiarity in a slide of the eyes or a set of the shoulders could say, ‘Yes, this, too, is of the family of Doeg, is Doeg’s potential that did not step forward into this dimension or place’ – so now we could see all the worlds that were not our planet, but lay there, lapping and touching it, each an absolute and a reality in its place and time.