The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘And you were Masson, for that time?’
‘No, not yet – Masson was instructing us. At that time Masson was very many, because of having to get the wall built. We youngsters were apprenticed to Masson. Klin and Marl were there too, but that was before they became Klin and Marl. We had our family names still. We were not born into the adult world, there was no pressure on us yet to choose our adult names. The next time I represented others was at harvest, but we were taking it in turns to speak for everyone, and to allot tasks. And so it went on. I did all kinds of work, just like all the others. And all of us at various times were Representatives.’
‘Yet some of these young people grew up to be Representatives and others did not?’
‘Yes. I have been thinking about that. It is strange, for I can’t see that those who did not were so different. And as for myself, I did not see myself then as someone who would be a Representative. I think it was not until I was Doeg that I became truly a Representative. Klin and Marl and myself were taken by Canopus to Planet 10. We were not formally instructed, but taken everywhere around it to see how their people lived, and how differently things were done there. It was the people from Planet 10 who were instructing the Rohandans, you say – before things went wrong there. But we did not know when we visited Planet 10 that there was any special link between us and those people, or could have been. But of course we could see that they were much more developed than we were. And when we three came back from Planet 10, we were all Doeg, for then we travelled everywhere over our planet and told what we had seen. And everybody marvelled – for before that people had not been taken abroad from our planet to other places. I wonder why you chose us, Johor? I remember wondering then! Because we were in no way different from any of the others. Perhaps we had all three done more of the different kinds of work than others, but not so very much more. No, when we talked about it, because of course we did among ourselves, we concluded that we were chosen because of our ordinariness. And we held on to that thought when we came back and became a nine days’ wonder with our amazing stories … It was then I first noticed that always when one is telling of something done or seen or experienced, it becomes a story, a tale … at any rate, our people listened as if to some tale or legend. But you have only to begin: We were taken to this or that city, and it was such a time of the day, and we were met by – and at once there is something marvellous about it, and they have to know what is going to happen next! And this is true even when you are telling of something quite ordinary, let alone of a new planet! Since then I have remained Doeg nearly all of the time, though Klin and Marl have not. Though I have been Klin and Marl and Pedug and Masson, when needed. But Doeg is my nature, I suppose.’
‘And when you were one of the five Representatives of the Representatives?’
‘Oh, that was convenience, chance – people are chosen almost at random.’
‘Any one of the Representatives can represent the others?’
‘Yes! You know that! You know everything I am telling you – yes, I understand that I have to tell myself what I know – but we sit here, we sit talking, you and I, the pair of us, and you prod and you push me to say things that I suppose are important …’
‘Unless you expect me not to take you seriously when you ask questions? Shall I ignore them, because you already know the answers? Representative Doeg, whom do you represent? And what are you?’
He leaned forward at this, looking straight into my face, but what welled up in me then put an end to a moment that could have saved me so much questioning, and pain. But we may not hasten certain processes in ourselves: they have to work their way, and often enough, without our active or conscious aid.
I was thinking of our poor peoples; the pain of their fate invaded me, the waste of it, the waste …
Johor said drily: ‘This is a lavish and generous universe.’
‘You mean, it can afford the deaths of a few million people.’
‘Is death something new to you? Is it only now that you begin to contemplate death – what it means?’
‘Are you saying to me that the deaths of old people who have had their lives and who have used them are the same as the deaths we have to confront now?’
‘Have children and young people and even infants never died with you? Have you only had to come to terms with the deaths of the aged?’
‘You cannot be saying to me that it does not matter if the populations of a whole planet have to die – a species?’
‘I have not said it did not matter. Nor that we, Canopus, do not feel pain at what is happening. Nor, Doeg, that we have not done everything to prevent this happening. Nor that we are not …’
But indignation made me cut him short. ‘But you are not able to space-lift off this planet its doomed millions? You do not have a little unwanted planet somewhere that we could be given to use and develop and make fruitful? You have no use for us?’
‘Are those really questions, Doeg? Very well, I shall treat them as such – though ask yourself, does Canopus, in your experience, deal in rhetoric? No, we are not able to take off from Planet 8 all your populations. We do not have the resources …’
But again I was so thoroughly possessed by indignation that I could not let him go on, and I exclaimed: ‘You do not have the resources! Or are you saying that some of us will be taken off, leaving the rest to their fates? If you are saying this, then I, for one, will refuse! I am not going to be saved at the expense of others! And I know that every one of the Representatives will say the same! We have not spent our lives working for our peoples, expressing our peoples, being our peoples, only to abandon them at the end …’ My mind blacked out there, and for a long time. I knew it had been a long time, when I came to myself and found I was sitting there, in the cold shed, opposite Johor, who was patiently waiting.
His eyes were keenly searching my eyes, my face.
What had gone on, inside me, during that long dark space, now made it impossible for me to challenge him as wildly and angrily as I had before. But after a time I heard myself bring out rather feebly: ‘It is strange, what you said then, that Canopus does not have resources for this or that … We have always thought of you as all-powerful, able to do what you like. We have never imagined you as limited. Limited by what, Johor?’ And I answered myself: ‘You are the creation and creatures of something, some Being, to whom you stand in the same relation as we stand to you? … Yes, that must be so. But I have not thought on those lines before … And you cannot transcend your boundaries, as we may not transcend ours …’ And here came welling up the rage again – ‘But Canopus has not suddenly found itself the subject of a cosmic accident! Your planet – or is it planets? – does your star nurture more than one dependant? Your planet has not found itself suddenly, and almost from one day to the next, blighted and cursed by some movement of stars so distant you probably have never even known they existed – have not even given names to?’
He said gently, humorously: ‘Well, not yet. But you know, it could happen to us, as it has happened to you.’
‘And to Rohanda.’
‘And to Rohanda.’ And here, at the name, he let out a sigh so deep and so painful that I had to cry out: ‘Ah, Johor, I wonder if you sigh and suffer for us, Planet 8, as I can see you do for Rohanda. Do you care for it so much? Is it so much more beautiful a place than this is – was? In talking to others, perhaps to your peers, on Canopus, do you sigh as you did then, at the word Rohanda, when someone says: Planet 8?’
He said: ‘It is true that I am at this time afflicted by Rohanda. I have just come from there. It is hard to see something as healthy and good and promising as Rohanda was lose its impetus, its direction.’
‘Worse than seeing us do the same?’
‘You forget, the future of your planet was to be the future of Rohanda! We sent to Rohanda especially skilled and admirable colonists, from Planet 10, to make a synthesis with a species we were bringing to a certain level, so that you, fr
om this planet, might make a synthesis with them, and become something quite extraordinary – so we hoped …’
I said: ‘You were planning to take off our populations to Rohanda. You have resources and intention for that – but not to save us now.’
‘There is nowhere to take you. Our economy is a very finely tuned one. Our empire isn’t random, or made by the decisions of self-seeking rulers or by the unplanned developments of our technologies. No, we have a very long time ago grown out of that barbarism. Our growth, our existence, what we are is a unit, a unity, a whole – in a way that, as far as we know, does not exist anywhere in our galaxy.’
‘So we are victims of your perfection!’
‘Perfection is not a word we have ever used of ourselves – and not in thought either … that word belongs only – to something higher.’
‘Victims nevertheless.’
I said this briskly, coldly, and with finality. I did not feel able to continue with the colloquy. I was tired in a way which had become only too familiar – as if movement, every word, even a thought that came into my head – was too heavy and difficult. I needed to sleep.
‘You can, if you need privacy, use my ice cave,’ I said. ‘But I have to sleep … I have to … I have to …’
As I sank down among my shaggy furs, I thrust towards him a skein of dried meats, and I saw him break off a piece and taste it, not with pleasure, but certainly with interest – Canopus was going to be interested in everything that happened, had to be, by its nature –even if this was the death of a planet …
I woke to a consciousness of being awake: I am here, in this heavy warmth of hides and furs. I was understanding that while in happier days I had woken thus, thinking: This is my condition, that was my sleep, I shall now move myself into this or that activity, it had never been with this sharpness, this urgency.
The ease of our old sensuous life had not needed from us a certain kind of self-awareness. Now I came up through layers of sleep, and my body was supported on warmth as it might have been on the warm waters of our old life, and my mind was easy and free too, yet I knew that almost at once the strain and the pain of our new life must begin. I was wondering if this was how our vast shaggy beasts woke on a half-frozen hillside, muscles and bones relaxed inside their housing of shaggy pelt. Did they feel, as they lifted their heads, their eyes opening on a spin of snowflakes, that in a moment effort was going to drive through those cumbersome limbs of theirs, forcing them to their feet, and to the work of keeping themselves fed and fuelled … but meanwhile, while they lay there, they floated on sleep, and the good memories held in sleep … but up they must clamber, hooves slipping on rocks and pebbles, and their teeth would scrape on the surfaces of bitterly cold stones for the lichens there, and soft noses would be pushing aside loose snow to reach the earth that is half vegetable, the earth food that lies thick and uncomfortably on the stomach? I was beast with them, inside beast’s covering, thinking of beast’s food, and so strong was my identification with them that I felt cold air sinking in through the mats of hair on my shoulder and half believed it wind, and I turned my head and saw Johor come quietly in a door he opened as little as he could, shutting it at once against the cold.
He sat down on a heap of half-dried heather, and looked at me. I quickly shut my eyes, for I did not feel, yet, like facing the effort of making my mind meet his.
‘There is a blizzard,’ he said – for he knew I was awake. ‘No one is out – I have been from house to house through the town and in each one, they are lying as you do, silent and still inside layers of hides.’
I was looking up at the roof over us: a mass of heather over which had been piled sods and earth. There was a bloom of frost on the heather, and on the stone of the walls.
‘And as you stood there in the doorways,’ I said, ‘you saw heads lift, one after another, and the eyes shine up at you, and then go out, as the heads were lowered back into sleep.’
‘Yes. Back into sleep.’
‘Back into the dark from which we all come.’
‘Back into the – light from which we all come.’
‘I have not been dreaming of the light, Johor! I came to myself out of …’
‘What?’
‘Something sweet and wonderful – I know that. Something I long for.’
‘The light. A world of dazzling light, all a shimmering marvel – where the colours you yearn to see are shining – from whence you came.’
‘So you say, Johor.’
‘And where you will return.’
‘Ah, but when, when, when …’
‘When you earn it, Doeg,’ he said softly, but strongly enough to make me move inside my skins, stretch, and take on the burden of my limbs that did not want to feel my weight – the weight of living. The weight of thought …
But I made myself sit up and face him.
‘And they,’ I said, ‘those poor people huddled there dreaming of paradises that were falsely promised to them – how will they earn it? How will they reach the light at last – wherever it might be, for you haven’t told me that, Johor.’
He looked hard at me and said: ‘Representative Doeg, when you lie there dreaming, do you imagine your dreams are only yours – do you imagine that you spin dreams out of yourself that are uniquely yours? Do you believe that when you come to yourself from a world of dreams you think no one else shares, your consciousness of yourself, this feeling I am here, Doeg is here – belongs only to yourself, and no one else shares that feeling? As you come awake, feeling This is Doeg, this is the feeling of me, Doeg – how many others are at the very moment coming awake all over your planet, thinking This is me, this is the feeling of me?’
It was bitter to me, to let go that little place I was able to rest on, take refuge in – the thought, This is me, I, Doeg – and I resisted.
I said: ‘Not long ago I was a quick-moving, slender, brown-skinned creature, who woke in the morning thinking: Soon I will step out into a sun that will polish my brown skin into little gleams of colour, and the air will flow in and out of my lungs in balmy mildness … that was I, then, that was Doeg. And now I am a thick heavy greasy creature with dull greyish brown skin. But I am still Doeg, Johor – that feeling has stayed – and so, now, you say I must let that go too. Very well, I am not the elegant handsome animal I was, and I am not this lump of uncouthness. But I still come up out of sleep and feel: Here I am. I recognise myself. It is I who lie here, after so many journeys and adventures in my sleep.’
‘Your shared sleep.’
‘My shared waking – very well then, Johor, what am I to hold on to in this – blizzard that is blowing away everything, everything, everything …’
‘Do you remember how we, Canopus, came to you all and gave you instruction in what made you, made your world?’
‘Yes, it was not long before you came to us and told us to build – the wall that would shield us from the ice.’
‘Which has, and does shield you from the ice.’
‘Which would have done better to give way long ago, putting an end to this long dreariness and torment.’
‘No.’
‘Because there is something left to be done? What? You have come all the way here from your place in the galaxy, and you have sent away your Traveller, and you sit here with me in this shed, and …’
‘Well, Representative?’
‘What do I represent, Johor?’
‘Do you remember what we taught you?’
I sat up in my nest, and pulled up the thick coverings all around me and over my head, so that only my face was bare. Close to me, Johor’s face showed under his hood.
‘I remember how we first understood that you were teaching us something in a way none of us had done before – directly. You asked us all to go up into the hills on the other side of the wall, and to choose a place where the ground rose all around. We massed there, all of us from the town and from a long way about. You asked us to bring one of the animals – those that are extinc
t now – that we intended to kill for food. You asked us to have it killed before the people assembled, and we, the Representatives, were pleased that the act of killing was not to be associated with your presence, for while we did not conceal what lay behind our eating of meat, we tried to see that there was no reason to dwell on it all – the slaughterhouses, the preparations. For when we came together to discuss this particular thing, we Representatives, we always found for some reason a reluctance in us, a fear, to do with this business of killing other animals: It has always seemed to us that here was an area of danger. Something that could take hold and spread – and yet we did not remember Canopus ever saying anything about it.’
‘One of four species that were used to make you was easily roused to killing. Some of us on Canopus did not wish to make use of that material, but others did, for this was – and still is – a physically strong species, enduring, able to bear hardship.’
‘When we all stood there on those hillsides looking down at that dead antelope, and my old friend Marl took up the knife to cut it open, I felt thrills of sensation all through me – and I was afraid to call this pleasure, but I knew that it was. And when the stomach was split from throat to tail, and the guts fell out, I knew how easy it would be to plunge my hands into that mass and then …’ A red mist blew across my mind, and when it had gone, the frosty twigs of the roof, the grey rocks, the pinched face of Johor looked even more meagre and ugly.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you did well to be careful.’
‘Yet you called us there, to watch the body of that animal cut up. We stood under a warm sun, and the wind brought us the spicy scents from the lake, and we saw the guts laid in a heap there, with the heart and the liver and the other organs, the head and the tail and the hide together, and the bones laid bare like the branches of a tree. And we were restless and moved about on our hillsides, and we sniffed at the scent of blood which seemed to belong to our memories, and then you came out from among us and stood surrounded by those bloody bits of meat and bone. And you said to us, “You are wondering, every one of you, where the beast has gone – where what is real of the beast, as you know it. Where its charm, its friendliness, its grace, its way of moving that delights you. All of you know that what is lying here is not what is true about this dead beast. When we look around at the hillsides, where the wind is rippling the grasses and whitening the bushes, we see there the same spirit that was the truth of this dead animal – we see a quickness and freshness and delight. And when we look up now at the play of the clouds – there is the reality of the beast. And when we look around at each other and see how beautiful we are, again we see the beast, the pleasantness and rightness of it …” And so you spoke, Johor, for a long time, before you stopped talking of beauty and grace. Then you bent over the piles of meat and bones, and you held up in your bare hands the heart, and you said to us that each one of us is a package of hearts, livers, kidneys, entrails, bones, and each one of these is a whole and knows itself. A heart knows it is a heart and feels itself to be that. And so with a liver and every other thing inside every animal, inside you. You are a parcel, a package of smaller items, wholes, entities, each one feeling its identity, saying to itself, Here I am! – just as you do, in moments of sensing what you are. But this assembly of heart, lungs, skin, blood, packaged so tight and neat inside a skin, is a whole, is a creature … And you made us laugh, Johor, standing there on that lovely morning, which I remember as colour, colour – blues and greens and soft reds and yellows – saying that a liver probably believed it was the best and highest organ in a body, and a heart too, and the blood too, and perhaps they even believe that a body is made up entirely of heart, or liver or blood … Yes, I remember how we all laughed. And that was how that lesson ended. And when Canopus came again to visit us, you brought with you the instruments for seeing the very small, and for a long time, every one of us, down to the smallest child, studied the very small through these instruments.’
‘And you were Masson, for that time?’
‘No, not yet – Masson was instructing us. At that time Masson was very many, because of having to get the wall built. We youngsters were apprenticed to Masson. Klin and Marl were there too, but that was before they became Klin and Marl. We had our family names still. We were not born into the adult world, there was no pressure on us yet to choose our adult names. The next time I represented others was at harvest, but we were taking it in turns to speak for everyone, and to allot tasks. And so it went on. I did all kinds of work, just like all the others. And all of us at various times were Representatives.’
‘Yet some of these young people grew up to be Representatives and others did not?’
‘Yes. I have been thinking about that. It is strange, for I can’t see that those who did not were so different. And as for myself, I did not see myself then as someone who would be a Representative. I think it was not until I was Doeg that I became truly a Representative. Klin and Marl and myself were taken by Canopus to Planet 10. We were not formally instructed, but taken everywhere around it to see how their people lived, and how differently things were done there. It was the people from Planet 10 who were instructing the Rohandans, you say – before things went wrong there. But we did not know when we visited Planet 10 that there was any special link between us and those people, or could have been. But of course we could see that they were much more developed than we were. And when we three came back from Planet 10, we were all Doeg, for then we travelled everywhere over our planet and told what we had seen. And everybody marvelled – for before that people had not been taken abroad from our planet to other places. I wonder why you chose us, Johor? I remember wondering then! Because we were in no way different from any of the others. Perhaps we had all three done more of the different kinds of work than others, but not so very much more. No, when we talked about it, because of course we did among ourselves, we concluded that we were chosen because of our ordinariness. And we held on to that thought when we came back and became a nine days’ wonder with our amazing stories … It was then I first noticed that always when one is telling of something done or seen or experienced, it becomes a story, a tale … at any rate, our people listened as if to some tale or legend. But you have only to begin: We were taken to this or that city, and it was such a time of the day, and we were met by – and at once there is something marvellous about it, and they have to know what is going to happen next! And this is true even when you are telling of something quite ordinary, let alone of a new planet! Since then I have remained Doeg nearly all of the time, though Klin and Marl have not. Though I have been Klin and Marl and Pedug and Masson, when needed. But Doeg is my nature, I suppose.’
‘And when you were one of the five Representatives of the Representatives?’
‘Oh, that was convenience, chance – people are chosen almost at random.’
‘Any one of the Representatives can represent the others?’
‘Yes! You know that! You know everything I am telling you – yes, I understand that I have to tell myself what I know – but we sit here, we sit talking, you and I, the pair of us, and you prod and you push me to say things that I suppose are important …’
‘Unless you expect me not to take you seriously when you ask questions? Shall I ignore them, because you already know the answers? Representative Doeg, whom do you represent? And what are you?’
He leaned forward at this, looking straight into my face, but what welled up in me then put an end to a moment that could have saved me so much questioning, and pain. But we may not hasten certain processes in ourselves: they have to work their way, and often enough, without our active or conscious aid.
I was thinking of our poor peoples; the pain of their fate invaded me, the waste of it, the waste …
Johor said drily: ‘This is a lavish and generous universe.’
‘You mean, it can afford the deaths of a few million people.’
‘Is death something new to you? Is it only now that you begin to contemplate death – what it means?’
‘Are you saying to me that the deaths of old people who have had their lives and who have used them are the same as the deaths we have to confront now?’
‘Have children and young people and even infants never died with you? Have you only had to come to terms with the deaths of the aged?’
‘You cannot be saying to me that it does not matter if the populations of a whole planet have to die – a species?’
‘I have not said it did not matter. Nor that we, Canopus, do not feel pain at what is happening. Nor, Doeg, that we have not done everything to prevent this happening. Nor that we are not …’
But indignation made me cut him short. ‘But you are not able to space-lift off this planet its doomed millions? You do not have a little unwanted planet somewhere that we could be given to use and develop and make fruitful? You have no use for us?’
‘Are those really questions, Doeg? Very well, I shall treat them as such – though ask yourself, does Canopus, in your experience, deal in rhetoric? No, we are not able to take off from Planet 8 all your populations. We do not have the resources …’
But again I was so thoroughly possessed by indignation that I could not let him go on, and I exclaimed: ‘You do not have the resources! Or are you saying that some of us will be taken off, leaving the rest to their fates? If you are saying this, then I, for one, will refuse! I am not going to be saved at the expense of others! And I know that every one of the Representatives will say the same! We have not spent our lives working for our peoples, expressing our peoples, being our peoples, only to abandon them at the end …’ My mind blacked out there, and for a long time. I knew it had been a long time, when I came to myself and found I was sitting there, in the cold shed, opposite Johor, who was patiently waiting.
His eyes were keenly searching my eyes, my face.
What had gone on, inside me, during that long dark space, now made it impossible for me to challenge him as wildly and angrily as I had before. But after a time I heard myself bring out rather feebly: ‘It is strange, what you said then, that Canopus does not have resources for this or that … We have always thought of you as all-powerful, able to do what you like. We have never imagined you as limited. Limited by what, Johor?’ And I answered myself: ‘You are the creation and creatures of something, some Being, to whom you stand in the same relation as we stand to you? … Yes, that must be so. But I have not thought on those lines before … And you cannot transcend your boundaries, as we may not transcend ours …’ And here came welling up the rage again – ‘But Canopus has not suddenly found itself the subject of a cosmic accident! Your planet – or is it planets? – does your star nurture more than one dependant? Your planet has not found itself suddenly, and almost from one day to the next, blighted and cursed by some movement of stars so distant you probably have never even known they existed – have not even given names to?’
He said gently, humorously: ‘Well, not yet. But you know, it could happen to us, as it has happened to you.’
‘And to Rohanda.’
‘And to Rohanda.’ And here, at the name, he let out a sigh so deep and so painful that I had to cry out: ‘Ah, Johor, I wonder if you sigh and suffer for us, Planet 8, as I can see you do for Rohanda. Do you care for it so much? Is it so much more beautiful a place than this is – was? In talking to others, perhaps to your peers, on Canopus, do you sigh as you did then, at the word Rohanda, when someone says: Planet 8?’
He said: ‘It is true that I am at this time afflicted by Rohanda. I have just come from there. It is hard to see something as healthy and good and promising as Rohanda was lose its impetus, its direction.’
‘Worse than seeing us do the same?’
‘You forget, the future of your planet was to be the future of Rohanda! We sent to Rohanda especially skilled and admirable colonists, from Planet 10, to make a synthesis with a species we were bringing to a certain level, so that you, fr
I said: ‘You were planning to take off our populations to Rohanda. You have resources and intention for that – but not to save us now.’
‘There is nowhere to take you. Our economy is a very finely tuned one. Our empire isn’t random, or made by the decisions of self-seeking rulers or by the unplanned developments of our technologies. No, we have a very long time ago grown out of that barbarism. Our growth, our existence, what we are is a unit, a unity, a whole – in a way that, as far as we know, does not exist anywhere in our galaxy.’
‘So we are victims of your perfection!’
‘Perfection is not a word we have ever used of ourselves – and not in thought either … that word belongs only – to something higher.’
‘Victims nevertheless.’
I said this briskly, coldly, and with finality. I did not feel able to continue with the colloquy. I was tired in a way which had become only too familiar – as if movement, every word, even a thought that came into my head – was too heavy and difficult. I needed to sleep.
‘You can, if you need privacy, use my ice cave,’ I said. ‘But I have to sleep … I have to … I have to …’
As I sank down among my shaggy furs, I thrust towards him a skein of dried meats, and I saw him break off a piece and taste it, not with pleasure, but certainly with interest – Canopus was going to be interested in everything that happened, had to be, by its nature –even if this was the death of a planet …
I woke to a consciousness of being awake: I am here, in this heavy warmth of hides and furs. I was understanding that while in happier days I had woken thus, thinking: This is my condition, that was my sleep, I shall now move myself into this or that activity, it had never been with this sharpness, this urgency.
The ease of our old sensuous life had not needed from us a certain kind of self-awareness. Now I came up through layers of sleep, and my body was supported on warmth as it might have been on the warm waters of our old life, and my mind was easy and free too, yet I knew that almost at once the strain and the pain of our new life must begin. I was wondering if this was how our vast shaggy beasts woke on a half-frozen hillside, muscles and bones relaxed inside their housing of shaggy pelt. Did they feel, as they lifted their heads, their eyes opening on a spin of snowflakes, that in a moment effort was going to drive through those cumbersome limbs of theirs, forcing them to their feet, and to the work of keeping themselves fed and fuelled … but meanwhile, while they lay there, they floated on sleep, and the good memories held in sleep … but up they must clamber, hooves slipping on rocks and pebbles, and their teeth would scrape on the surfaces of bitterly cold stones for the lichens there, and soft noses would be pushing aside loose snow to reach the earth that is half vegetable, the earth food that lies thick and uncomfortably on the stomach? I was beast with them, inside beast’s covering, thinking of beast’s food, and so strong was my identification with them that I felt cold air sinking in through the mats of hair on my shoulder and half believed it wind, and I turned my head and saw Johor come quietly in a door he opened as little as he could, shutting it at once against the cold.
He sat down on a heap of half-dried heather, and looked at me. I quickly shut my eyes, for I did not feel, yet, like facing the effort of making my mind meet his.
‘There is a blizzard,’ he said – for he knew I was awake. ‘No one is out – I have been from house to house through the town and in each one, they are lying as you do, silent and still inside layers of hides.’
I was looking up at the roof over us: a mass of heather over which had been piled sods and earth. There was a bloom of frost on the heather, and on the stone of the walls.
‘And as you stood there in the doorways,’ I said, ‘you saw heads lift, one after another, and the eyes shine up at you, and then go out, as the heads were lowered back into sleep.’
‘Yes. Back into sleep.’
‘Back into the dark from which we all come.’
‘Back into the – light from which we all come.’
‘I have not been dreaming of the light, Johor! I came to myself out of …’
‘What?’
‘Something sweet and wonderful – I know that. Something I long for.’
‘The light. A world of dazzling light, all a shimmering marvel – where the colours you yearn to see are shining – from whence you came.’
‘So you say, Johor.’
‘And where you will return.’
‘Ah, but when, when, when …’
‘When you earn it, Doeg,’ he said softly, but strongly enough to make me move inside my skins, stretch, and take on the burden of my limbs that did not want to feel my weight – the weight of living. The weight of thought …
But I made myself sit up and face him.
‘And they,’ I said, ‘those poor people huddled there dreaming of paradises that were falsely promised to them – how will they earn it? How will they reach the light at last – wherever it might be, for you haven’t told me that, Johor.’
He looked hard at me and said: ‘Representative Doeg, when you lie there dreaming, do you imagine your dreams are only yours – do you imagine that you spin dreams out of yourself that are uniquely yours? Do you believe that when you come to yourself from a world of dreams you think no one else shares, your consciousness of yourself, this feeling I am here, Doeg is here – belongs only to yourself, and no one else shares that feeling? As you come awake, feeling This is Doeg, this is the feeling of me, Doeg – how many others are at the very moment coming awake all over your planet, thinking This is me, this is the feeling of me?’
It was bitter to me, to let go that little place I was able to rest on, take refuge in – the thought, This is me, I, Doeg – and I resisted.
I said: ‘Not long ago I was a quick-moving, slender, brown-skinned creature, who woke in the morning thinking: Soon I will step out into a sun that will polish my brown skin into little gleams of colour, and the air will flow in and out of my lungs in balmy mildness … that was I, then, that was Doeg. And now I am a thick heavy greasy creature with dull greyish brown skin. But I am still Doeg, Johor – that feeling has stayed – and so, now, you say I must let that go too. Very well, I am not the elegant handsome animal I was, and I am not this lump of uncouthness. But I still come up out of sleep and feel: Here I am. I recognise myself. It is I who lie here, after so many journeys and adventures in my sleep.’
‘Your shared sleep.’
‘My shared waking – very well then, Johor, what am I to hold on to in this – blizzard that is blowing away everything, everything, everything …’
‘Do you remember how we, Canopus, came to you all and gave you instruction in what made you, made your world?’
‘Yes, it was not long before you came to us and told us to build – the wall that would shield us from the ice.’
‘Which has, and does shield you from the ice.’
‘Which would have done better to give way long ago, putting an end to this long dreariness and torment.’
‘No.’
‘Because there is something left to be done? What? You have come all the way here from your place in the galaxy, and you have sent away your Traveller, and you sit here with me in this shed, and …’
‘Well, Representative?’
‘What do I represent, Johor?’
‘Do you remember what we taught you?’
I sat up in my nest, and pulled up the thick coverings all around me and over my head, so that only my face was bare. Close to me, Johor’s face showed under his hood.
‘I remember how we first understood that you were teaching us something in a way none of us had done before – directly. You asked us all to go up into the hills on the other side of the wall, and to choose a place where the ground rose all around. We massed there, all of us from the town and from a long way about. You asked us to bring one of the animals – those that are extinc
‘One of four species that were used to make you was easily roused to killing. Some of us on Canopus did not wish to make use of that material, but others did, for this was – and still is – a physically strong species, enduring, able to bear hardship.’
‘When we all stood there on those hillsides looking down at that dead antelope, and my old friend Marl took up the knife to cut it open, I felt thrills of sensation all through me – and I was afraid to call this pleasure, but I knew that it was. And when the stomach was split from throat to tail, and the guts fell out, I knew how easy it would be to plunge my hands into that mass and then …’ A red mist blew across my mind, and when it had gone, the frosty twigs of the roof, the grey rocks, the pinched face of Johor looked even more meagre and ugly.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you did well to be careful.’
‘Yet you called us there, to watch the body of that animal cut up. We stood under a warm sun, and the wind brought us the spicy scents from the lake, and we saw the guts laid in a heap there, with the heart and the liver and the other organs, the head and the tail and the hide together, and the bones laid bare like the branches of a tree. And we were restless and moved about on our hillsides, and we sniffed at the scent of blood which seemed to belong to our memories, and then you came out from among us and stood surrounded by those bloody bits of meat and bone. And you said to us, “You are wondering, every one of you, where the beast has gone – where what is real of the beast, as you know it. Where its charm, its friendliness, its grace, its way of moving that delights you. All of you know that what is lying here is not what is true about this dead beast. When we look around at the hillsides, where the wind is rippling the grasses and whitening the bushes, we see there the same spirit that was the truth of this dead animal – we see a quickness and freshness and delight. And when we look up now at the play of the clouds – there is the reality of the beast. And when we look around at each other and see how beautiful we are, again we see the beast, the pleasantness and rightness of it …” And so you spoke, Johor, for a long time, before you stopped talking of beauty and grace. Then you bent over the piles of meat and bones, and you held up in your bare hands the heart, and you said to us that each one of us is a package of hearts, livers, kidneys, entrails, bones, and each one of these is a whole and knows itself. A heart knows it is a heart and feels itself to be that. And so with a liver and every other thing inside every animal, inside you. You are a parcel, a package of smaller items, wholes, entities, each one feeling its identity, saying to itself, Here I am! – just as you do, in moments of sensing what you are. But this assembly of heart, lungs, skin, blood, packaged so tight and neat inside a skin, is a whole, is a creature … And you made us laugh, Johor, standing there on that lovely morning, which I remember as colour, colour – blues and greens and soft reds and yellows – saying that a liver probably believed it was the best and highest organ in a body, and a heart too, and the blood too, and perhaps they even believe that a body is made up entirely of heart, or liver or blood … Yes, I remember how we all laughed. And that was how that lesson ended. And when Canopus came again to visit us, you brought with you the instruments for seeing the very small, and for a long time, every one of us, down to the smallest child, studied the very small through these instruments.’