The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (11 page)

‘How does the material or substance of love modify that minuscule dance? How relate? For it is the
physical
substance of our bodies, our hearts, that breeds love or hate, or fear or hope – is that not so? – and cannot be separate from it. The wind that is love must arise somewhere in those appalling spaces between the nub of an atom and its electrons that dissolve, like everything else, into smaller and smaller, and become a fluid or a movement –
 or a door into somewhere else
?

‘I can ask you this question, knowing I share this with you, saying
love
, saying
fear
– and then I come back to the realm of dreaming, in which I spend a third of my life, which is soaked through and through with emotions, but also with sensations and feelings that have nothing to do with emotions, but are more to be described or suggested as colours suffusing a thing or a place – I can say, “Johor, I have been dreaming,” coming back to this world here, and my dreams will have been more vivid than my waking, and the atmosphere I have spent my sleep-journeyings in will be one I have known all my life, since babyhood, and
I cannot find a word
that will convey this feel, or taste, or colour, or sensation to you or to anyone else. This is the ultimate solitude, Johor … and yet I wonder, when you say, “I have been watching you sleep – watching you dream –” if you, with those eyes of yours that are made in the planet of a star weighted differently than ours, can say as you watch: “Doeg is moving in
that
landscape of sleep, that place, meeting these and these people – Doeg is
partaking of the substance of that place 
– I know he is, because I can see the substance of that other place, or time, or pulse, moving in the spaces of the subatomic particles, or movements” … and if this is so, Johor, then it lifts a little of the loneliness of knowing that there is nothing I can say, even to my closest friends, that will convey to them the flavour of a dream.'

‘When you dream, do you imagine you dream for yourself alone, Doeg? Do you think that when you enter a realm in your sleep it is familiar only to you? That you alone of the peoples of this little planet of yours know that particular realm? You may not be able to find a word to describe it so that others may know where you have been, but others know it, because they too move there as they dream.'

And that is where that colloquy ended, because Alsi came in, with Marl and with Masson, and Zdanye, and with Bratch and with Pedug who had had the care of the Education of the Young before The Ice.

While Johor and I had sat there in that cold shed, waking and dreaming, around the pole that still was free of the snow and the ice, had come the slight movement towards warmth that we now called summer. In a space it would have taken us twenty of our days to walk across was an area of growth, and for the first time a kind of plant we did not know. It was very quick-growing, springing up into its full height in a few days, a frail sappy bush, aromatic, laden with blue flowers – and it covered the whole of this part of our globe, perhaps an eighth or a tenth of it. Klin, who usually worked down there through the year, had been visiting a valley nearer to the middle of the planet, which had been very warm and productive, hoping that it still might be mild enough to grow something, even if only heathers and brackens. But it was not; it was filled with snow, and so he had left it to go back to the polar regions, and had been met by messengers saying that herds of our great beasts were converging from everywhere to reach fields and hillsides covered with a new plant, which filled the air with scents new to us all. And by the time Klin reached ten days' walking distance from the pole, where tundra and greyness met this brief summer land, he saw that these herds, multitudes of them, covered everything, trampling and rearing and lowing, and making the earth shake with their delight, their intoxication at this marvel – fresh sappy aromatic food. They were drunk with it all, were lumbering around, and tossing up their enormous heads as if the weight of horns there was nothing, and roaring and even prancing, and it broke the heart, said Klin, to see these desperate hungry beasts released there, into a happiness and lightness – if one could call these heavy chargings and buttings light – yet, if you had become used to seeing a landscape filled with heavy melancholy animals, heads drooping, sniffing at the earth fodder with dislike, yet eating it; animals that seemed hardly able to move, and that slid and slipped and fell on icy places when they did move – if this was how, with pain and compassion, you had become used to seeing them – then, by contrast, this sudden energy was a wonderful thing.

But it was not only the herds that longed for freshness and greenness: they were eating, were consuming, what might be useful to our populations. From the towns and villages near the polar regions, people were roused up with promises of new fresh food, and they came blinking and stumbling out from their smelly dark places into the familiar greyness – but saw beyond the thick low snow clouds a pale blue, our frail fleeting summer. And, as they came down towards the pole through bitter tough stems and sprigs of the plants of the tundra, they saw in front of them blue, a blue haze spread over the earth, as if the skies had fallen, or as if the earth had taken to reflecting the skies. And even the weight of the great beasts, crowding and massing everywhere, could not completely hide the loveliness of these blue-flowered plants. And the air was full of a spicy tangy scent, which revived the people, banished their terrible indifference and lethargy. They divided into bands, and drove the beasts off half of the fertile lands – for we did not want to deprive them altogether, we needed their meat, and had been afraid that they too would be extinct soon, so little was there for them to eat. The plants sprang up again at once where the beasts had grazed them to the earth – sheets of pale blue lay everywhere. And the people, flinging off their coats of thick hides, lay among these flowering bushes, weeping with joy, and even rolling, or running about and jumping, as the poor beasts had done – but were not doing now, in their more confined and restricted space, but were eating steadily, and as quickly as they could, filling themselves while they could, for they seemed to know that this bounty would not be permanent – it was already halfway through this ‘summer' of ours, which no longer grew fruit, or grains, or vegetables, and had recently been growing very little more than sparse grasses. Yet here was this miracle, this marvel, that you could walk for twenty days through green and blue, under blue skies where the clouds of our old world – white and thick and lazy and delightful – moved all day, as if they knew nothing of the dark sullen cloud masses that crammed the horizons.

After a day on these aromatic pastures, our people were reborn, were their old selves: it was clear that the plants held some vital and powerful principle for health. Klin sent messages to Bratch, who was the Representative for Health, and he came, and sent for his helpers, and soon this plant, which grew again as quickly as it was cut, had made quantities of a kind of hay, that was more dried flowers than foliage, and then – it was a question of deciding how to apportion the life-giving food, for there was not enough of it to provide our people with even a mouthful each.

Who was to be benefited? On what basis was it to be decided?

Klin and Marl and Masson and Pedug and Bratch, standing around inside the shed, telling us all this, were restless; wanted, we could see, not to be there, had in their minds the sight of the fair brief world of the polar summer which they had reluctantly left to confer with me, with other Representatives in the area – and with Johor. But I could see they scarcely looked at him, their eyes seemed to move over and away from him. And this was not only because they had not before seen him so clearly as a being like ourselves, suffering and pallid inside a caul of beast's skin, but because they did not expect anything from him. Yet no one had said to them: ‘This planet will not be saved, the promises made to us are without a future.' Before, it was to have been expected that everyone would come up to Johor, saying: ‘Canopus, where are your fleets of Space Travellers, when will you take us all away?' But no one said this. And Johor stayed quietly sitting on a heap of sacks filled with furze.

‘Why stay here, in this dying place,' said Marl, ‘even for as long as we need to confer – come, we will go down to the summer, and we can make our decisions there.'

And so we, Johor and I, and all of them, and ten of the other Representatives, pushed our way through the snows around our town, and then stumbled and slid down hillsides, and mountain passes where we believed we would die of the cold, and down again to where ahead of us we could see blue, only blue – blue skies and blue earth – and a keen wind brought to us not the sharpness of cold but warm balmy smells that we had forgotten. And my eyes seemed to be swelling and growing, as they fed on the colours for which they were starved … And yet, even as I stumbled towards the blue and lovely summer ahead, I was saying to myself, I, a smear or haze of particles on which light shines, I, a nothing, a conglomerate of vast spaces defined by a dance my mind cannot comprehend, am running forward into – nothing, for if I saw this summer land as Johor does, with his Canopus eyes, I would see a universe of space in which faint shapes drift and form and dissolve – I, nothing, run forward towards nothing, weeping as I run – and where live the emotions that make these tears, Johor? Where in the great spaces in the faint mist that I am, where in the fluid flowing structure of the dance of atoms, where … and how … and what, Johor?

When we reached the hillsides where green showed under the bushes laden with blue flowers, we flung ourselves down and rolled and, seated above the summer with the snow peaks and half-frozen lands at our backs, looking into a sunlight where drifted cloud shadows and sudden chills and reminders of the winter that would soon come down again over this scented miracle, we talked about what we must do, what we had to do.

We talked. Johor did not, though he sat among us as if he was one of the conferring group.

Our problem was practical: when we had decided who was to benefit from this food, how was it to be conveyed? Movement between villages and towns had ceased, except for teams who dragged in the supplies of dried meat. How were we to carry loads of this light but bulky stuff up into the snow and the ice, and, when it was distributed, were they to cook and eat it, or eat it as it was – for all of us were eating the flowers straight off the bushes without ill-effects, apart from the mild stomach disorders which we had to put up with as an aspect of what we had to expect now. At last Bratch suggested that we should pile the dried plant into the ponds and the water holes, hoping that the enlivening principle in it would be transferred to the water. Some of the water could be carried in containers up into the snow-covered lands, but soon the bogs and marshes would freeze again as the cold came back and we could send down teams with sledges to transport this ice, or even to drag up chunks of it across the snow. And, meanwhile, send messengers everywhere to say that this shallow summer was here, providing vegetable matter for those who could or would make the effort to come and enjoy it.

Some of those who were making the living fence to keep the herds off the part of the harvest we had allocated for the use of our peoples went off to make sure the news reached all the populated centres. As for us, we stayed where we were, using every hour of daylight to pile the hay into the bogs and fens. The weather was not hot enough to make fermentation an immediate problem. The earth-smelling waters of these moorlands soon were emitting the fragrance of the plant, and our nights were spent lying out among the living plants, mostly awake, for we knew that this time of reprieve would soon end. The stars shone down, but not with the hard cold brilliance in blackness of the nights of the expedition up to the other pole: this was a distant mild shining, and they were continually going out as mists and veils blew across our skies.

By the time the messengers had come back, the plants had ceased to spring up again as they were cut; shadow lay more often on the hills and valleys than sun did; and the winds were not balmy, but made us shelter inside our deep coats. And the herds were no longer rearing and charging about, or bellowing, but were silent again. We all of us went to a place where we could look down on a valley crammed with these beasts, who stood with lowered heads above earth where there was no longer any green, or blue, or the soft blowing movement of growing things. We looked at a bull standing close to us, with the group of females that he served, and the calves of that season – there had been very few calves born for many seasons. We saw in the disconsolate, discouraged set of his shoulders that he felt himself a failure – lacking – hurt; for once again he would be commanding a group perpetually hungry, not able to breed, since nature was saying no, there is no future; once again they would have to lower their soft muzzles to the dense earth that is half-vegetable, forcing the unliked stuff into their stomachs that only partially digested it. And the females were anxious to keep their calves near them, and their eyes were red and wild, and they licked and maintained these small replicas of themselves with a desperation that said everything of the emotions that filled them. From horizon to horizon, the herds stood there – waiting. And we, too, now would have to return to our waiting.

There were about forty of us Representatives on that slope above the herds, and a hundred or so of those who had taken the messages to the people. Some people were coming in, in small groups, to take their share of the harvest, which was so sparse now, and they too rolled around in the green and ate the flowers. But only a few had been able to rouse themselves from their torpor and make the journey. We stood, a small multitude, in a hollow between low hills.

Long before those times of The Ice, I had learned to watch the disposition of people, events, what is said and what is not said – so as to understand what was likely to happen –
what was already happening, but not yet fully disclosed.
Those crowds standing about there, again huddling into the thick skins, watching the skies, where the first snow clouds were massing, were not differentiated in any way, and Johor stood among them, almost unnoticed, though everyone knew that Canopus was among us. Soon we Representatives moved out of the mass of people and up on to a slope. It was because this was expected of us; we could see, feel, sense, that we should do this. But Johor stayed where he was.