The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  And so we went, day after day, and it was as if we walked into a spreading blight, for soon, even on the left side of the wall we saw how grasses shrank and dimmed and vegetation lost its lustre, and the skies lowered themselves with a white glare somewhere behind the blue. And on the right the snows were reaching down, down, towards us, and our familiar landscapes were hard to recognize.

  There was a day that we stood all together on our barrier wall, looking up into the freezing immensities, with Canopus among us, and we saw that the enormous heavy animals that Canopus had brought us from another of their planets were crowding close in to the wall. They massed there, in vast herds, with the snow driving down behind them, and they were lifting their great heads and wild trapped eyes at the wall, which they could not cross. A short way ahead of us was a narrow gap which we had closed with a sliding door half the wall’s height.

  Canopus did not have to tell us what we must do. Some of us went down the side of the wall on to the rough soil, where the grasses had long since gone, leaving a thin crust of lichens, and pulled back the gates. The herds lifted their heads and swung their horns and trampled their feet in indecision, and then saw that this was their deliverance – and first one beast and then another charged through the gap, and soon from all over the frozen lands came charging and thundering herds of animals, and they all, one after another, went through the gap. What heavy clumsy beasts they were! We could never become accustomed to their mass and weight and ponderousness. On their heads were horns which at their base were thicker than our thighs, and sometimes they had four and even six horns. Their hooves left behind prints that would make small ponds. Their shoulders, to support these crests and clubs of bone, were like the slopes of hills. Their eyes were red and wild and suspicious, as if their fate was to query forever what had ordained them to carry such weights of bone and horn and meat and hair, for their coats hung down around them like tents.

  These herds passed through the gap in our wall, taking twenty of our days to do it, and soon there were none of these beasts of the cold in that part of our world that was doomed to be swallowed by the cold. They were all in the more favoured parts – and we knew, without Canopus having to say anything to us, what it meant.

  Had we really imagined that our guardian wall would contain all of the snow and ice and storm on one side of it, leaving everything on the other side warm and sweet? No, we had not; but we had not, either, really taken into our understandings that the threat would strike so hard into where we now all lived … into where we were crowding, massed, jostling together, with so much less of food and pleasantness that our former selves, our previous conditions, seemed like a dream of some distant and favoured planet that we only imagined we had known.

  We stood there, looking into hills and valleys where grass still grew, though more thinly, and where the movement of water was still quick and free; we saw how the herds of animals of the cold spread everywhere, making our ears ring and hurt with their savage exulting bellowing because they had found some grass. We were a company of thin yellow light-boned birdlike creatures, engulfed in the thick pelts of the herds, wildly gazing at a landscape that no longer matched us. And, as we had taken to doing more and more, we gazed up, our eyes kept returning to the skies, where the birds moved easily. No, they were not the small and pretty birds of the warm times, flocks and groups and assemblies darting and swirling and swooping as one, moving as fast as water does when its molecules are dancing. They were the birds of this chilly time, individual, eagles and hawks and buzzards, moving slowly on wings that did not beat, but balanced. They too had heavy shoulders and their eyes glared from thick feathers, and they circled and swept about the skies on the breath of freezing winds that had killed our familiar flocks sometimes as they flew; so that, seeing the little brightly coloured bodies drop from the air, we had looked up and imagined we could see, too, the freezing blast that had struck them down out of the sky. But they were birds, these great savage creatures; they could move; they could sweep from one end of a valley to the other in the time we could hold a breath. We had once been as they were, we told ourselves, as we stood there on the wall slowed and clumsy in our thick skins – the wall which, on the side towards the ice, was dimmed and clouded, no longer a brilliant shining black, but shades of grey. Frosted grey.

  Now that the herds had all gone through the wall, we filled the gap by pushing across the gate. But Canopus said that as soon as we got back to our houses, work parties must be sent out, and this gap, and the others that had been left, must be built up as strongly and thickly as all the rest of the wall. For the openings that had been ordered to be left in the wall long before there had been cold, or even the first signs of cold, to save animals that had not even been brought to our planet, had fulfilled their purpose. We no longer needed them. The wall must be perfect and whole and without a weak place.

  We walked on for some days after that before there was a blizzard of an intensity we had not even been able to imagine. We huddled on the safe side of the wall, while the winds screamed over us and sometimes came sucking and driving down where we were, and we shivered and we shrank, and knew that we had not begun to imagine what we had, all of us, to face. And when the screaming and scouring stopped and we climbed up the little projecting steps to the top, carefully because of the glaze of ice on them, we saw that on the cold side snow had fallen so heavily that all the hollows and the heights of the landscape were filled in with billowy white, and the wall was only half its previous height.

  By then we were not far from our starting place, and we all longed to be back in our homes, our new thick-walled solid houses with roofs that had been pitched to throw off any snowfall – so we had thought. But now wondered. Were we going to have to live under snow as some creatures lived under water? Were we going to have to make little tunnels and caves for ourselves under a world of snow?

  But still, on our side of the wall, where our towns and cities and farms spread, there was some green, there was the shine of moving water. And knowing of our hunger and our desperation and our longing, Canopus did not now make us turn our faces from this livingness, but allowed us to stumble on, looking warmthwards, trying to ignore the snowy wilderness that was crowding down on us.

  And it was during these days that Johor fell back with me, and talked to me, alone. I listened to him and I had my eyes on my fellows in front, the Representatives, and when I knew that what I was being told was for me, and not for them – not yet, at least, because they could not yet face it – there came into me an even deeper sense of what was in store. But what worse could there possibly be?

  Ahead of us this great wall of ours stood high and black above marshes where the snows of the blizzard had partly melted, leaving streaks and blobs of thin white on dark water. We stood there, Johor and I, and watched our companions walk away, and become no more than a moving blur on the crest of the wall where it rose to cross a ridge and then disappeared from our view. It climbed again, and we saw it, still mighty and tall though so far away, showing exactly what its nature was, for on one side the snows piled, and on the other the beasts fed on wintry grass and on low grey bushes.

  Johor touched my arm, and we walked forward to stand where the marshes lay on either side. On the right the dark white-streaked waters seemed channels to the world of snow and ice. But on the other side the marshes were an estuary which led to the ocean. We called it that, though it was really a large lake, enclosed by land. We had been told of, and some of us had seen, planets that were more water than land – where lumps and pieces and even large areas of land were in watery immensities. It is hard to believe in something very far from experience. With us everything was the other way about. Our ‘ocean’ was always a marvel to us. Was precious. Our lives depended on it, we knew that, for it helped us to make our atmosphere. It seemed to us to represent distant and rare truths, was a symbol to us of what was hard to attain and must be guarded and sheltered. Those of you who live on planets where liquids are as common
as earth and rocks and sand will find it as hard to imagine our cherishing of this ‘ocean’ of ours as we found it to visualize planets where water masses bathed the whole globe in a continuous living movement, speaking always of wholeness, oneness, interaction, of rapid and easy interchange. For the basis of our lives, the substance which bound us in continuity, was earth. Oh yes, we knew that this soil and rock that made our planet, with water held so shallowly in it, and only in one place, except for the streams and rivers that fed it, was something that moved, just as water moved – we knew rock had its currents, like water. We knew it because Canopus had taught us to think like this. Solidity, immobility, permanence – this was only how we with our Planet 8 eyes had to see things. Nowhere, said Canopus, was permanence, was immutability – not anywhere in the galaxy, or the universe. There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow. And at a hillside. Or a mountain.

  I was standing there with my back to the icy winds, face towards our precious lake that was out of sight beyond tall plumy reeds, and I was thinking: And ice? – we must see this new enemy of ours as something all fluidity and movement? And it was at that moment that it came into me for the first time that our ocean might freeze. Even though it was on the ‘safe’ side of our barrier wall. The thought came like a blast of cold. I knew it would be so, and I already felt something of what Canopus was going to tell me. I did not want to turn and face Johor – face what I had to.

  I felt his touch on my elbow again and I did turn.

  I saw him as he saw me, fragile and vulnerable inside thick pelts, hands hidden inside sleeves, eyes peering out from deep shaggy hoods.

  It is a hard thing, to lose the sense of physical appropriateness – and again my eyes went skywards where an eagle lay poised on air just above us.

  ‘Representative,’ said Johor gently, and I made my gaze return downwards, to what I could see of his yellow face.

  ‘Your ocean will freeze,’ he said.

  I could feel my bones huddle and tremble inside my thin flesh.

  I tried to joke: ‘Canopus can bring us new beasts with heavy bones for the cold – but what can you do for our bones? Or shall we all die out as our other animals did, to make way for new species – new races?’

  ‘You will not die out,’ he said, and his strong brown eyes – inflamed though, and strained – were forcing me to look at him.

  Another new thought came into me, and I asked: ‘You were not born on Canopus, so you said. What kind of planet did you come from?’

  ‘I was given existence on a warm and easy planet.’

  ‘As Planet 8 was, once.’

  ‘As the planet is that you will all be going to.’

  At this I was silent for a very long time. There were too many adjustments to make in my thoughts – which whirled about and did not settle into patterns that could frame useful questions.

  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.