The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (3 page)

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.

Perhaps it was the extent of the changes that prevented us. A world of snow – was how we had thought of it. But it was ice now. The snow had packed, had massed, had gone hard and heavy. A ringing world – a stone flung on to it reverberated. It seemed to us as we stood high there, the wind in our faces, that a bird swooping past could make the ice sing and thrum. And when the blizzards came, the winds drove snow masses up into the air, whirled them around the hard clanging skies and dropped them again, to slide and swirl into new piles and drifts. Soon to freeze again and make new ice packs that came driving down the valleys towards us. Now as we looked out, we had to remind ourselves of the real height of the barrier wall by glancing down behind us to the sheltered side, for the snows were more than halfway up the wall. Quite soon – we joked – we would be able to step off the top of that wall and simply walk off on snow. Or on ice.

We decided not to institute rituals of snow-watching and wall-climbing, or make strong songs to combat the soft wailing yearning songs that now were heard all day and half the night. We did not really know how to assess the effects that such forced submersions in reality might have.

Once we had known exactly what would result from this or that decision.

It was in the nature of the new dispensation that the Representatives who had the care of the animals were now more important than any of us. Only down near the warm pole was it possible to grow crops, and these were of new cold-resistant varieties. We could now grow enough to feed people as much grain as once we did.

Our diet had changed, and very fast. The herds of enormous shaggy beasts who seemed to thrive on the new thin grasses and lichens gave us meat, gave us hides for clothing, provided us with cheeses and all kinds of soured milks that we had not before troubled to develop. A child was now weaned on to meat and cheeses: not long ago the diet would have been cooked grains – our food had been mostly fruit and cereals and vegetables. We wondered how this new way of eating might be affecting us. Canopus had the experience to tell us but Canopus had not been near us for some time. We would ask them …

The Animal Keepers and the Animal Makers called us all together to say that we were dependent on this one species of animal. We had learned – had we not? – how fast and thoroughly species could change … disappear … come into being. What guarantee had we that some new climatic shift might not kill off these new beasts of ours as quickly as the animals of our old time had been killed?

We were all together in one of our newly built places, thick walls around us, the roof heavy above. Very quiet our living had become, where we had been open to every breeze, every change of the light.

In this deep silence we sat together and measured our situation by how our responsibilities had changed.

The Representatives of the Representatives, of whom I was sometimes one, did not change their numbers. We were five, but sometimes we had other tasks as well. There was now one Grain Keeper and Grain Maker. The Fruit and Vegetable Makers had become Animal Makers, as I have suggested. The Food Makers had always been the most necessary of our Makers and Keepers. Next to them, those who built and cared for buildings. The numbers of these had not lessened, but increased. Fifteen of our fifty now concerned themselves with how to shelter our populations in this hard time. There were the Maintainers of the Wall. The others were concerned with the making of implements and artefacts of all kinds, some introduced by Canopus, others developed by us. Not long ago we had one Representative for the Law. Now there were several, because the tensions and difficulties made people quarrel where they had been good-humoured. It had been, before The Ice, a rare thing to have a killing. Now we expected murder. We had not thieved from each other: now it was common. Once civic disobedience had been unknown. Now gangs of mostly young people might roam about throwing sticks and stones at anything that seemed to antagonize them – often the base of the wall.