The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (4 page)

But this meeting was not concerned with anything but food. It was necessary to discover, or make, or plan, new sources of food.

What had we overlooked, or deliberately left unused? There was our ocean, filled with creatures of all sorts, but even now our sense of the sacredness of the place made us reluctant to look at it as a food source. I have to say that Canopus had never done more than remain silent, when we talked of our Sacred Lake: this was how they dealt with attitudes of ours they expected us to outgrow. There were a few of us who long ago had come privately to think that this sacredness and holiness was foolish, but we talked about our thoughts only with each other. We had learned from Canopus that argument does not teach children, or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

So when some of our band of companions showed signs of emotion at the suggestion that our lake should be examined, we remained silent, as Canopus did at such times.

There remained only what we had turned our backs on and what we so feared: the freezing wilderness. When we had made our observation tours along the wall we had seen that the great birds we so loved to watch had become a snowy white, were no longer brown and grey. Wings soft and feathery and white as some kinds of snow now balanced on those hostile currents. Sometimes we might see a great many birds, but it was hard to pick them out against the snow masses, and often showers or storms filled the air so that birds and snow together whirled about the skies. But they must be feeding on something … If we could not see any creatures on those white wastes, it did not mean they were not there.

It was decided to send a party of us to the cold pole, and I was chosen, because I had been to the other planets and had seen – though not from as close as this – landscapes of the cold. And two of the others had been on similiar journeys. I, Doeg, Memory Maker and Keeper of Records, Klin who had once been our best Fruit Maker, and Marl who had been one of the Keepers of the Herds that had become extinct were the three who had been taken abroad by Canopus, and we were of those who sometimes found our companions overprone to simple emotions, as in the matter of our lake, and we had long been close friends. The other two were young, a boy and girl whose turn had come for apprenticeship. With us, reaching the age of qualifying for apprenticeship had been the occasions of festivals and rejoicing. It meant entry into adulthood. But now, with our once various and always expanding crafts and skills reduced, and with so much of what we had to learn to do difficult and dour and sometimes savage, there was little joy left and too few opportunities, and this journey of ours was seen by all our young as something marvellous: the competition was keen. Such were our fears that we were reluctant to choose the best, but we did in the end choose the best. Their names were Alsi and Nonni and they were brave good children, and they were beautiful. Or, would once have been: as things were, they huddled yellowly, as we did, inside what seemed to us like moving tents of thick clumsiness.

Our trouble was that we were not able to imagine the reality of the savagery of the cold. Not even though we had made brief trips into that region, not even though we searched our memories for anything we had learned of other planets and their means of dealing with extremes.

We put on to little sliding carts supplies of dried meat – which we all hated, though we were hungry enough for it; hide coats in case we lost or spoiled ours; and a sort of tent made of hides. We all thought this small provision would be enough to keep us safe.

We set out in a still morning, sliding down from our wall, not troubling about the steps, which were slippery and dangerous now, and falling into a drift from which we had to struggle. And we had to fight through waist-high feathery snow all that day, so that by nightfall we had not reached our objective: a certain hill in which we believed we would find a cave. Our sun, which seemed feeble enough these days, burned us by reflection and hurt our eyes. All around was white, white, white, and the skies soon filled with white snow masses and the whiteness was a horror and an agony, for nothing in our history as a race, and therefore nothing in our bodies or our minds, was prepared for it. The dark came down when we were in a vast field where the snow was light and soft and spun about and made plumes and eddies. Our tent could not find a hold, but kept sinking as if into water. We huddled together, opening our shaggy coats so as to press our bodies' warmth into each other, and our arms sheltered each other's necks and heads. That night there was no snow or storm, so we survived it, though we would not otherwise have done. In the morning we struggled on through the soft suffocating stuff, and then climbed up on to a glacier of hard ice which was so slippery that we made no quicker an advance, though it was better than the thick softness of the snow, into which we were afraid we would vanish altogether. On the ice we slipped and stumbled, but ignored our bruises and our aches, and that night reached the hill in which we knew was a cave. But the entrance to it was a sheet of ice. We were able to put up our tent in a hollow where snow lay. It was made of ten of the largest hides stitched together, with the pelts inwards, and we laid down more hides on the ice, and huddled there till morning. We were not as cold as the night before, but the shaggy fell of the inside of the tent was soaked with the moisture from our bodies and in the morning it was solid ice – stiff rods and points of ice that threatened to cut us as we wriggled out, face down, into the new day, which was clear and free of cloud.

We had begun to understand how little we were prepared for this journey, and I for one wanted to give it up. We three older ones all wanted to turn back, but the two youngsters pleaded with us, and we gave in. We were shamed by them – not so much by their brave and shining eyes, their dauntlessness, but by something more subtle. When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitiful and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn such hardship, had to forgo so much that we, the older ones, had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we
felt
that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when a species, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in ways that we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and high – even if it is only in potential – to their children. And if there isn't this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces.

We, the three Representatives, agreed to go on.

Because the skies were clear and blue on that third day we could see the great white birds everywhere, floating over the snows and the ice, looking downwards for – what prey? At first we could see nothing, but then, straining our eyes against the glare, did see small movements that seemed to creep and run in a way different from the smoke and the surge of snows moved by the wind. And then we saw little black specks on the white, and they were droppings; and then larger pieces that were the droppings of the white birds, which had in them fur and bones, and from these we were able to form some picture of the little snow animals before we actually saw one: we were on it, it was under our feet, and it rolled over in a pleading confiding way as if in play. A sort of rodent, completely white, with soft blue eyes. And once we had seen them we were able to pick them out, running around, though not very many – certainly not to be seen as a food supply. Unless they could be bred in captivity? But what were they feeding on? We saw one eating the droppings of the big birds … if the birds ate them, and they ate their own remnants in the birds' droppings, then this was a closed cycle and hardly feasible – but there seemed nothing available for them to eat. We did see a few, a very few, snow-beetles, or some kind of insect, white too – but what did
they
feed on, if they were the food of the little white beasts?

As we planned to travel polewards for several days yet, we did not capture specimens but pressed on. Ahead I knew was a range of hills and in them some deep caves, and we hoped they would not be completely iced in. On an afternoon when the sky was a metallic dark-blue glare, we slid and staggered our way up a river that we knew was one only because we had enjoyed it when it ran between green fertile banks and was crowded with boats and swimmers. The sides now rose sheer up, cliffs of ice. To reach the place of the caves we had to cut steps in the ice, and the boy Nonni fell and hurt his arm very badly, though he pretended not to be much hurt.

Although it would soon be dark and we wanted very much to be sheltered, we had to give him time to recover. We sat down in a hollow in the ice, with our backs to the cliff and looking out over a coldly brilliant scene: a sharp blue sky that seemed to us cruel, defining the dead white of the landscape. We were breathing shallowly and as little as we could because each breath hurt our lungs. Our limbs ached. Our eyes kept trying to close themselves. Yet we knew that what we felt was nothing compared to the pain that made Nonni sit cramped there, breathing at long intervals in great gasps, his eyes seeing nothing of the vivid blue and white and dazzle around us. He was not far from slipping off into unconsciousness, and Alsi put her arms around him from behind, carefully because of his broken elbow, or shoulder – we could not tell what was broken, because of the mass of clothing – and she enclosed him in her vitality and her strength. To us three watching, the contrast between the two young faces was a warning: hers, in spite of what she had to endure, so alive and commanding, his all drowse and yellow indifference.

‘Nonni,' she began, in what was at once evident to us as a deliberate attempt to rouse him, ‘Nonni, wake up, talk to us, you must keep awake, you must talk …'

And, as his face showed the peevishness and irritation of his reluctance, she persisted, ‘No, no, Nonni, I want you to talk. You lived near here, didn't you? Didn't you? Come on, tell us!' He shifted his head from side to side, and then turned it away from the pressure of her cheek on his, but his eyes opened and there was consciousness in them: he understood what she was doing for him.

‘Where did you live?'

He indicated with a weak lift of his head, which at once fell back against her shoulder, that it was somewhere there in front of us.

‘And how? And what did you do?'

‘You know what I did!'

‘Go on!'

Again he resisted her, with an involuntary movement that said he wanted only to slide away into sleep, but she would not let him, and he gasped out: ‘Before The Ice, it was there – there.'

There
was now the plain of snow, undulating, cut by crevasses and sending up small eddies and whirls of snow.

‘And you lived in a town down there, and it was one of our largest towns, and people used to come from all over the planet to visit it, because it was the only town like it? A new kind of town?'

He struggled to evade her with irritable shiftings of his head, shutting his eyes, but again his will to live came back.

‘The town was built there because these hills are full of iron. Under the ice here are the mine workings. A road goes from here to there – the best road on the planet, because of what it had to carry, heavy loads of ore, from which we made trucks to carry even more ore …'

Here he seemed to drowse again, and Alsi said: ‘Please, Nonni.'

‘Before our town was built and we began mining, there was no centre for making iron, though it was made in a small way everywhere. It was Canopus who told us to look for iron here, and what to look for, and then how to work it and mix it with other metals. It was clear to us that these metals we were making would change the way we all lived. Some people did not like what was happening. Some left our town again and went to live in other places where life had not changed.'

‘And you, did you like it?'

‘It seems that I must have, because I was going to be a worker in metals, like my parents. Both of them knew all the new processes. Just before The Ice I travelled with them, to a town not far from our ocean, and it was the first time I had seen anything different.'

‘And how did it seem?' said Alsi, teasing him, for she knew.

‘It seemed to me charming,' he said, full again of the youthful scornfulness he had felt, so that we all laughed, and he laughed too, since now he was able to look back and see himself. ‘Yes, it was so
pretty,
and so
soft.
With us everything was so much harder. Every day we had a new invention or discovery, and we were learning to make metals we hadn't ever thought of. It seemed as if something quite new had happened to us, and we could not help but make new things and have new ideas. After that visit, I was glad to get back. And Canopus came again about then. Because we had seen how differently people lived in other parts of the planet, and we could make comparisons, we asked Canopus how things were on other planets. And suddenly our minds seemed filled with newness … we were stretched … we were much larger than we had been … we knew how many different ways there were of living, we talked about how species began and grew and changed – and died out…' Here he stopped for a moment and was silent, a darkness coming over his face.

‘Nonni, we are not going to die out, Canopus says so.'

‘Some of us will not,' he said, in a direct statement of something he felt, something he knew, and it chilled us. We knew then, or at least we older ones did, that Nonni would not survive.

‘That was the real change, it seems to me now. Not only that because we were making new metals and all kinds of machines we knew life on our planet would change, but because for the first time we thought in this way at all – and then began to think about how many different ways of living there could be – and then, of course, it followed that we wondered if we could choose how we would develop, choose the direction we would go in … It seems now as if what really happened for the first time was the idea of choice … And then there was The Ice!' And he laughed out strongly, an angry laugh, as only the very young can laugh. The anger injected energy into him, and he staggered up, and was supported by Alsi. ‘What are we doing sitting here? Look, the light is going. We should get under cover.'