The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing

  It seemed then, as we turned to go back, that in front of us the whole sky had become a wall or cliff of frozen water, for it was stifling white from the zenith to our feet, and as we stared forward into it we could see nothing, not even the towering breaking crest of the wall. Many of us were thinking that there was no purpose in walking back into that freezing smother of white, that inevitable death. But we did walk on, and on, and when we came to the first cluster of little ice huts, and crawled into one, coughing and blinking our eyes because of the greasy smoke from the burning fat, a face appeared from the heap of skins, and a voice said: ‘Someone came. It is time the Representatives went down to the pole. It is summer again there.’ And the speaker coughed, and the face went again in the dimness, under a shaggy sleeve, and we crawled out backwards along the ice tunnel, and stood all together in a hollow in the storm, and thought of the blue flowers and soft sappy greens of the summer that had gone. We found the sledges that had had the dead sea-things on them, and we sent messengers up into the blizzards to say that supplies of the magical blue plant were being sought for – and fifty of us Representatives travelled down, down, to seek for the summer. Again we travelled in the low space between a pressing white smother of cloud and the billowing white of the land, the wind at our backs, and again we huddled together through the dark nights, inside caves of snow we made for ourselves as the light went. And it seemed to us that the dreadful dark of the nights was shorter, and we felt that soon we would reach the summer lands. We were looking ahead, as we reached each rise or hill, with all the strength of our eyes and our minds, trying to penetrate the obliterating white, to see if there, at last, the sky would show a gleam of blue, or even of a lighter grey. But then we knew that we had passed beyond where, last season, the snows had ended and the open tundra had begun. Still snow encompassed us. Still we laboured on till from the top of a mountain, we saw the pillar, or spire, or column that marked the pole, and around it, but not for very far, was the greyish green of the moorland. And there were no flowers, no plant life, at all. Nor was there any sign of the herds. But we did not have the moral energy to wonder about the herds, for what we were facing, we knew, was the end of the planet. This was where we had, finally, to accept the end of our shifts and contrivances and our long endurances. When we reached where the snow became thin, or lay in wet yellowish banks and shoals, like coarse damp sand, and became only streaks and spots on soaked grass and on bogs – there we settled ourselves, trying to feel that the distant sun had some strength in it. We looked ahead across a day’s walking distance to the tall column, and all we could see was the dark earth with sometimes a little dull green, or a smear or stain of grey.

  We had very little to eat, only a few pieces of dried meat. But we did not want to eat. It was as if, while we few waited there, not knowing what we were to think or plan for, we had already gone beyond the need to eat, or to work for sustenance, or to maintain our pitifully depleted and deprived bodies that shivered inside the dense hide coats we had not removed – for it was not warm enough to do without them. Our eyes were drawn to the tall slender spire of the column that Canopus had set there, and had used for so long as a guide for their craft. Its absolute perfection of proportion, its balance, even the way it had been set in a certain relation to the slope of hills and the sky, spoke of Canopus, Canopus – and not of this planet; and what was in all our minds as we waited there, gazing at the thing, was only Canopus, who was coming to save us.

  Yet I knew very well that there were no space-fleets coming in – I knew it now as I had not before, with a quiet and definite conviction, which was giving birth to – yes, hope; but of a kind that was unfamiliar to me. To believe, as we had, and for so long, or at least with part of our minds, that one day our skies would flash and shine everywhere as they filled with the Canopean fleets, and that then all our suffering populations would find safety ‘in the stars’ – that was a resting on the future. But it was not a future that had a continuance with our past. It was a real and complete change that took place in me then, as I finally relinquished the old hope and dream, and looked steadily at the perfection of that tall black spire there, which still reflected lights from the sky, just as our wall had once done when it was clean and unfrosted. Inside me was some small spring of strength and self-reliance that I felt to be indestructible, and becoming stronger. This strength was what I was – I, Doeg; and across it, as clouds or birds traverse a sky not changing it at all, went thoughts and emotions. Among them, but very faint and even rather ridiculous was the familiar: One day Canopus will come and save us … And it seemed that when I looked into the faces of my friends, faces known to me as well as my own; into their eyes, which sometimes seemed to me as much mine as theirs – that I was seeing there what I knew to be true of myself. Even as one might say: ‘Perhaps they will come tomorrow!’ and another answered: ‘Or the day after, or next week – the summer still has days or weeks to live!’ – it seemed that these words were coming out of a superficial part of them, and that they were not even fully aware of what they said. I could see from their eyes that their minds were occupied with quite other kinds of thought, or speculation, or – even – conviction.

  It is a very remarkable thing how ideas come into a mind, or minds: one minute we are thinking this or that, as if no other thought is possible to us; shortly after, there are quite different beliefs and possibilities inside our heads. Yet how did they get there? How do they arrive, these new notions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, dispossessing the old ones, and to be dispossessed, of course, soon enough in their turn?

  I knew, as we all waited shivering inside our coats, with the faint pale sunlight on our faces, that while my companions muttered: Canopus will come, we shall be saved – and the other shreds and pieces of our old dreams – changes were going on inside them that they were not conscious of.

  And so we stayed there, being together on the hillside that had patches of grass and low tough plants on it, with the snowy lands behind us from where drove harsh and bitter winds. Nor did any of us show any disposition to move, or to talk of our responsibilities to our populations, or to discuss what we ought to do – whether to go in search of the vanished herds, or to send messages about their disappearance, or any of the other things that normally would have driven us up and into activity.

  We were watching not only the dreary spaces of moor and tundra around the column but, more than these, each other. Increasingly, our eyes were on each other, searchingly, patiently – as if we did not know every one of us, as in fact we did; so very well that we could at any moment take on each other’s work and – in a sense – become each other. We gazed close into eyes and faces as if there was very much more to be learned there than we had ever believed. And, soon, we were all in a rough circle, looking in and not out at the little spaces of our ‘summer’. We faced inwards, as if the truth available to us was there, between us … in us … among us. In our being there together, in that way, in our extremity.

  And so, later, were we found by Alsi and Johor who came out of the white wilderness towards us, showing by the way they stumbled and slid over the roughnesses of the ground how exhausted they were. And they flung themselves down among us, and lay there, eyes closed. And we saw how the yellow skin stretched over the bones of their faces.

  We waited until Alsi opened her eyes and sat up, and Johor did the same.

  I said to her, ‘And how was it with you, as Doeg?’ She said, smiling, ‘Doeg, it seemed to me that as I spoke, everything that had happened to me, all my thoughts and my feelings, everything that I believed I had to be, was being put together in words, words, words – parcelled up, packaged up, and sent away … yes Doeg, I-Doeg – saw Alsi doing this and that, feeling thus or thinking so – and who was Alsi? I watched her, saw myself moving there among all the others … and now, I look back at myself as Doeg sitting in the shed with Johor, I see myself there, and see Johor, two people sitting together talking. And who was Doeg? Who, Doeg, is Doeg? And where now are
Alsi or Doeg – for what is left of us all now? And to whom will you or I or any one of us be telling our little tales, singing our little songs?’ And she looked, smiling, at me, and then at Johor who was listening as he lay propped on his elbow, and then at all the others. Slowly she looked at one after another, and we all looked back at her. When Alsi came back to us, with Johor, our small assembly of people had been made even more sharply aware of ourselves, our situation. We felt ourselves, as sharply as we saw – on a cold hillside, under a low cold hurrying sky, half a hundred individuals sitting together, fifty heaps of dirty shaggy animal skin and inside each a shivering parcel of bones and flesh, and thoughts and feelings too (but where were they, what were they?). We huddled there, listening to how the blizzards on the horizon squealed and raged and threatened this brief summer of ours which was no more than a small space or time at the very extremity of our planet, for the frosts of the approaching winter were beginning to show themselves. White on black, small white particles on black soil, crumbs and crystals of white scattered on the rocks and the grey-green grasses and on the wiry little plants – and in the air around us white flakes, only a few still, drifting, catching the weak sunlight, floating and sinking to settle with the frost on the earth. High above us, under heavy white clouds that had black crevasses, circled the great birds of the snow, white on white.

  ‘If you are no longer Alsi,’ I said to her, ‘that means the snow animals are dead?’

  ‘The pens are empty now, all of them.’

  We all looked, and then understood that this was what we were doing, at her hands: those knots of thin bones that had once been so large and so capable, tending so well the small, the weak, the vulnerable.

  And she was looking at Johor. And that was a look not so easily described. For one thing, there was nothing in it of suppliance. Or even of need. What was there, and most strongly, was the recognition of him, of Canopus.

  ‘I am no longer Alsi,’ she said to him. ‘Not in any way, or in any capacity.’ This sounded almost like a question; and in a moment she answered it. ‘Somewhere else there is Alsi – another place, another time. Alsi cannot disappear since Alsi is and must be continually re-created.’ Again she seemed to wait for him to speak, but he only smiled. ‘Though we cannot see them, since it is day now, and the sunlight up there obscures this truth, our sky is full of stars and planets and on them there is Alsi. Alsi – there I am, since it must be so.’

  ‘Since it must be so,’ voices echoed her from our group.

  ‘So, since this is not Alsi, who am I, Johor, and what is my name?’

  I said to him: ‘Doeg tells tales and sings songs in all times and all places, everywhere people use sounds to communicate, so if I am no longer Doeg, then Doeg still is, and perhaps as the dark comes down …’ – and it was coming down, as we talked, and small distant stars appeared – ‘… we are looking as we raise our eyes at worlds where Doeg is at work, for Doeg has to be. But who am I, Johor, and what is my name?’

  And then Klin, the Fruit Maker, the Guardian of the Orchards: ‘There is not one orchard or fruit tree or fruit anywhere in this world of ours, nothing is left of all that beauty and richness – and so Klin I am not, since Klin was what I did – Klin is at work somewhere else, there Klin grafts shoots to shoots, Klin buds and blends and makes, and causes branches to lie heavy with blossom and then with fruit. But not here, not anywhere here, and so I am no longer Klin. And what is my name?’

  And Bratch: ‘The skill in my mind and in my hands is at work now, at work everywhere there are creatures of flesh and sinew, and blood and bone – Bratch is needed, and so Bratch must be, though it is not here, for here there is nothing left to do, since all over this world of ours our populations lie dying in their icy homes. Bratch I am not, since Bratch is what I did – and what is my name, Johor, what is my name?’

  And Pedug: ‘Where species reproduce themselves, where the young are born continually to replace those that have to die, there Pedug is, since Pedug has to be. Pedug is re-created always and everywhere, in every time and place, where Pedug is needed. So Pedug is not lost and gone because Pedug no longer exists on our planet. But I am not Pedug, Johor, and – what is my name?’

  So it went, with every one of us, and the dark was heavy around us, and the chant, or song, or plaint, continued through the night, one after another of us, asking Johor, asking him, saying where and how and why, but answering ourselves, answering all we wanted to know ourselves, but ending always with that question we could not answer, since it was beyond us – what am I, who am I, and what is my name? Or, what was our name? – we, the Representatives, who represented now no skills, or abilities, or working functions, but who still sat there, cold and small and so very few, on that hillside, through the night, all through the night – and then the weak sun was shining dimly, a greyish gleam from greyish skies, and there was no colour left anywhere, for snow had fallen gently and silently, and the tall column Canopus had set there rose up out of fresh soft white, through which pushed the tips of low plants and the stiff dead grasses.

  ‘There is one of us who still has a name,’ said Alsi, as we became silent, since everyone had spoken.

  ‘But Marl is not here,’ one said. ‘The Keepers of the Herds are not here.’

  ‘And the herds are not here either, yet there is nowhere else for them to be.’

  We sat on there, that day, as the snow fell quietly around us, for Johor said nothing, and we did not know what it was we ought to be doing.

  And, as the light went, for another night, three figures came staggering towards us out of the gloom, and fell among us, breathing deep and painfully, and slept for a time, while we waited. These were Marl, and until they spoke, we could not feel that this particular stage of our being together was concluded.

  It was in the night that they came up out of their exhaustion, and told us the tale of the herds – yes, it was Doeg we listened to for a while, Marl as Doeg, and this was what we were told.

  That multitude of great hungry beasts found themselves crowding closer together every day, as the snows spread down and around them, making a natural corral of snowbanks, a barrier that the beasts showed no disposition to cross, since all the food that remained to them on the entire planet was in this small area around the tall black column. The hay masses from the last summer did not provision them for long, and then they browsed on the wiry plants and the bitter grasses, and then on the soil that is half vegetable. And still the snow crept in around them, and soon they stood together body to body, many thousands of them, a multitude, and there was nothing to eat. Many died, and those that were alive were spurred by their situation into an intelligence no one could have believed possible to them – they pushed the corpses out of the mass of the living with those horns of theirs that were so heavy and, we had thought when we first saw the beasts, so useless: What could they possibly be used for? Yet these horns had turned over the soil, when it became necessary to eat it, had dug roots out of the earth, had overturned boulders in the desperate search for food, had been used, finally, to push their dead out of what remained of the usable space.

  And then, for a time, they stood, facing out into the world of snow, all of them, their tails into the centre. And then Marl, watching from the hillsides, anguished at their inability to aid these poor beasts, saw that from every part of the multitude, small groups of them, and then larger and larger numbers, were breaking away. For days Marl watched how the mass that remained at the pole thinned, and still thinned, as the beasts left. But where were they going? There was nowhere for them to go! Yet they went. Lowing and lumbering, pawing the earth as they went, and scarring it with sweeps and scythings of their horns, as if wishing to damage and wound what would no longer supply them with sustenance; screaming out their rage and despair, their eyes red and wild and furious – these herds thundered up and away in every direction from their last grazing grounds, and then their going, which had shaken the earth, was silent, for the deep snows quieted the b
attering of those multitudes of hooves. The watchers on the hillsides had heard the wild lamenting bellowing of the herds as they rushed up and into the blizzards – and soon none was left around the pole, there was only the black earth that had been horned up, and fouled with masses of droppings, and eaten quite bare. And not one beast, not one. Marl, then, separating, followed the herds up into the thick blizzards, though following them was not easy, since there was no spoor in those heavy snows. But at last, each one of these Representatives reached the populated areas, and thought that perhaps the beasts had believed that here there might be food for them, or at least the companionship of people: who could say what there might be in the minds of these doomed animals, or what degrees of hope or intelligence were being forced out of them by their situation? But no, the herds had thundered up to the old towns and villages, empty now, and gone through them, not pausing for anything, except when some beast needed to punish and scar as had been done in the southlands, their old feeding grounds, and had raked horns into soil – so they directed the thrust of their horns along the sides of buildings and sheds and pens, and trampled down what they could, till the settlements looked as if we had destroyed them as we left. And then the herds had gone on – with nowhere to go. Where the wall had collapsed, making passes into the terrible lands of the perpetual blizzards, the herds had climbed up, and then stood waiting on the other side, white beasts now, their coats heavy with snow, their breath white on white air, till all of their particular group had joined them. Having assembled, as if this had been some plan worked out by them, they all charged up into the north, all together, bellowing and lamenting, to their certain deaths.

  Marl, at various places along the wall, where it had fallen forward under the glaciers, saw this, saw the herds go off to seek death. And having seen it and understood, met together again, and then, knowing that there was no point at all in following the beasts, for they would have been swallowed up by the blizzards, travelled slowly down to where they knew we all would be. We, the Representatives, sitting on our snowy hillside, waiting. Waiting, as it turned out, for them, for Marl, who was no longer Marl, since there were no beasts left alive on our planet anywhere, not one, and so – elsewhere Marl worked, had to work: in other times and places Marl was and had to be. Marl used the skills of matching and mating and making and feeding and breeding and caring. Marl could not cease to be, since Marl was needed. But here, with us, on our cold planet, Marl was not. ‘And so, Johor, since we are no longer Marl, what is our name? For while I know I am not what I was, am not Marl, since I was what I did – well, now I do nothing, but here I am, am something, I sit here, among the falling snow, with us all, I look at you, Johor, you look at us, at me – and I feel myself to be here, here; I have thoughts and I have feelings – but where are they, what are they, these thoughts, these feelings, in these packages of frozen bones and chilly flesh? So I am not nothing, Johor, yet what am I? If I have a name, then what is it?’