The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (13 page)

Alsi was there too, so I saw then, sitting apart from us both. She was holding something between her large hands, which were ungloved, and bending forward over it, and mourning. One of the young animals was ill, or dying, and she was trying, with the vitality that still remained in her chilled hands, to revive it. She rocked as she sat, not knowing she did, back and forth, and from side to side, and I saw that this was a protest or a claim by her suffering much-tried body, a statement that a strong fighting life was still in it – just as much as it was an expression of the pain in her mind. And I thought again that bodies and minds were linked so closely, one affecting the other – yet in the wide spaces between the pulses that are the particles of the particles of the particles of the units of our physical being, there are no signs of – grief, for instance, or of love. Love, love, was grieving there in every small part of Alsi's large but gaunt body, for she knew, her terrible pain showed it was so, that this death meant others – the offspring of her two pets, these pretty delightful little babies, would soon be dead, for they could not endure their lives.

‘Do you realise, Johor,' she said to him, in the same heavy accusing way I sometimes used with him, ‘that there are no young things left with us on our planet? The calves born during the summer to the herds have died, they were not strong enough, and no more are being born – and outside there in the pens there are only adults. I cannot make them breed, nothing I do will change what they are feeling – or what they know.' And she wept bitterly, her face close to the little furry creature in her cold hands, for it was quite dead, and stiffening.

Johor said nothing, but watched her.

When she had quietened herself, she said, still desperate, but in a low voice: ‘What are we going to do? When the herds are gone, and the adults of the snow animals gone – there will be nothing for us all to eat. Oh, I shall be glad, glad, for I am so sickened by this meat we have to eat that the last mouthful I have to force myself to chew will be a celebration for me – even if it means the end of me …' But here I could see some thought had struck her, for her face changed, and her eyes did not see us for a time, but the eyes of her mind looked inwards. She sighed at last, and came back to us. Carefully she laid down the heavy cold lump in her hands that had so recently been the delightful little animal playing around us, and she looked long and steadily at another that had stopped playing and was sitting shivering close to her foot. She bent, stroked it gently, and her face had sorrow hardened into it, but she did not pick it up.

‘Alsi,' said Johor, ‘I want you now to set aside Alsi and become Doeg.' She looked at him. We often enough changed our roles, did different kinds of work: becoming for those times the Representative for whatever it was that was needed, so it was no new idea to her that she should ‘become Doeg', for she had ‘been Doeg' quite recently, when it was her turn to remember and to reproduce in words experiences that we all needed to have fixed and set so that our annals would be in order. She had told of the journey made up in the lands of the ice to the colder pole, standing among us Representatives, while we listened carefully; and while this was being done, she was Doeg.

‘I want you to go back in your mind into your childhood, and tell of your feelings then, what you thought and how you saw your life.' And he picked up one of the still healthy young animals, which at once started to lick and bite his fingers playfully and to rub its nose and face against them, and he sat there with it lightly caged, held before him on his knees. Its soft contented purring filled the icy shed, and its soft blue eyes blinked at us with the delighted recognition young things give to their discoveries: Oh, what a marvel this world is! How fantastic! Extraordinary! Wonderful! Look – what I can do with it! Watch me! And, held there among the thicknesses of Johor's coat, it put out a white paw to hook a flake of snow that had floated in somehow through the interstices of the roof, and then, as the flake vanished into the fur, the baby stretched and yawned, in a luxuriousness of pleasure in movement, and fell asleep as its muscles slackened, and dozed, in the most charming way, its chin on Johor's fingers.

Johor looked gently at the girl, whose eyes were running hot tears. She pushed the hood back off her face, feeling it confine her, and then in the same impulse shrugged the coat off her shoulders. Under it she wore layers of the worn and ragged clothes of our warm and smiling days; and these too her hands tugged and ripped as if on their impulse, not hers, and she was sitting there half-naked in her nest of shaggy pelts.

We did not see ourselves naked, these days; nor see the bodies of others. This was partly because of the terrible cold, and partly because of shame. I do not think that Alsi had intended to bare herself in this way, but she was being driven by grief. Her eyes were fixed on the little creature in Johor's hands, whose stillness now was not the moving breathing stillness of sleep, but had a stiffness about it. Her hands went out towards it in a wild unconscious gesture that said No, no, no, – I shall save you, and then withdrew themselves, and tugged again at her hair, and her eyes appeared in a fixed stare, between her fists.

‘Alsi,' said Johor – and laid down the little corpse beside him, on the frozen floor.

‘I was born – born, but
I
cannot remember, and you know that, but I suppose I gave pleasure to everyone, as this little beast has just done to us, because of my charm and my unconsciousness of it. And I grew – but I don't remember how, but it was under your command and in your care, Canopus, since that is the essence of our life and our being. And I knew more and more of myself, thinking more often every day:
Here I am, this is Alsi  
– and my feeling of myself was not in my body so much then, though I delighted in it, but somewhere else … perhaps in
you
, Canopus – but then, it is not for us to know, is it? But I remember how I would come to myself, a young child, filled with wonder, and delight, and marvelling, just as this poor dead thing was, until a moment ago. And then, suddenly, something else happened, my breasts appeared and …'

She sat staring in front of her a while, then her fists dropped from either side of her face, and her hands touched lightly just once the upper part of her chest, and then, in disbelief and repudiation, went lower … what we could see there was her rib cage, with the yellow skin stretched tight over it, each bone evident and – where were her breasts? Her hands crept lower, as her eyes were fixed, unconscious, ahead of her, and she pulled aside more garments and we saw that from the lower part of her chest two skinny bags depended, and these bags ended in small hard lumps, and on the skin that held the lumps were brown wrinkles – her nipples. She held these lumps in her large still strong hands, and then let them go, and explored with her hands her shoulders, where the bones and the joints showed clearly under stretched skin.

She was not weeping now, or grieving, but on her face was the look of one trying and trying to accommodate the impossible. The old, the very old woman's body, shrivelled by starvation, was displayed there before us, and her face was bare to us – gaunt, sallow, with sunken black eyes. Yet in the hollows near the sockets there was a vulnerability, something still fresh and youthful, and I was thinking, stoutly: Well, when we Representatives are all taken off here, and we eat again, as we need to eat, then Alsi will become a young woman, it is not too late and … But this thought sank away into the depths of my mind, and was not at ease there. No, I was thinking, no, that's not it, it is not – I must not make up these tales and fabrications, comforting myself, thinking how others must be comforted.

She put back the folds of her rags over the skin-covered bones, and pulled the thick coat around her again, and the hood down over her head, and was again not much more than strong dark eyes peering out from greasy shaggy hides.

‘Alsi!' said Johor.

‘Very well then! I was born … and now I shall die. No, Johor, if you want me to say how I see my life, then that is how, more and more often, I do see it … Tell me, when you look back along your life, do you – no, that is a useless question, I know it before I ask. You live so much longer than we do, it must seem to you when you look at us just as it seems to us when we look at these little creatures here whose lives are so short – or to them when they look at a snow-beetle! All the same I shall ask it, for it fills my mind, Johor, I cannot stop thinking and wondering about how you, you people with your Canopus minds, how do you experience your memories? For that is what you are wanting me to talk about now, isn't it? Memory, a thin transparent sort of stuff which is all that is left of a life when you have lived it? Do you feel as if your life has had no substance in it? No, of course you don't, but all the same I must ask. Do you feel as if you could blow aside your memories with a single strong breath? For that is how I see my life, like a scrap of cloth lying in a corner, or the fragment of a highly coloured web, the colours fading as I look: memory – memories, for there's nothing there of my life! Yes, I know I am going to die before I normally would, but if a life is something, then the third of a life is something and I am a third of the way through mine. It is nothing, my life, a little dream: I swear, Canopus, that when I come back into myself after a sleep, my dreams sometimes seem more vivid to me than my life does.
And yet 
– here is where I have to ponder, and brood, and still make no sense of it all when I'm done with it – as I begin a day, it is like a hill I must climb, a weight I have to push uphill, something that has a weight of difficulty in it. Sometimes, as I wake, I cannot face the long heavy day ahead. Often, in the middle of a day, the thick dragging quality of it is such that it crushes me back into sleep again, even if only for a few moments, anything to lose the burden of being … conscious. Yes, of being awake to what is the texture and substance of a day – like a piece of cloth you weave, which may have patterns that you have chosen, but which you cannot choose
not
to weave, cannot refuse to finish, because this is a task which has been set. I stand sometimes in one of those pens out there, with the snow falling around me in one of its thousand ways – light or thick, and blowing sideways or straight or wet or dry, or in crumbs or the large soft masses flakes make when they are clinging together – I look, and I feel as if every step I take to here, where the food is, and the task of carrying it all out and spreading it about, and then checking on how the snow-beasts are, and how many, and if any have died … all this is so difficult, Johor, it is as if every atom of my body is being held in a force. And yet I do it – and having done it, I say: That's done, I've accomplished that, I've finished that task, and the next task lies ahead – collecting the others who make up Alsi to gather food for the beasts, or whatever is the next thing that has to be done. All day, one burdensome effort after another; and then the day is finished, and the blessed night is here, and I look back at the day – and it's gone! A little coloured smear of thought, a few pictures running together, a scene of me standing in a pen, with the animals gathering around waiting to be fed, or me walking with hunched shoulders through a blizzard, and perhaps the sensation of cold around my neck or numbed chilled feet. A day! The memory of a day! A day that was so hard to accomplish, and when it is done – nothing! A life … the memories of a life. Surely, Canopus, there is something here that is out of phase, out of a proper fitting together? It seems to me more and more impossible,
wrong
, that the actual doing of a thing, the living it, has as its shadow so fleeting and faint a record: memory. And I ask myself more and more, is this why we need Doeg? What is Doeg but an attempt, and even a desperate and perhaps a tragic attempt, to make the faint coloured shadow, memory, stronger? Give our memories more substance? Is that what Doeg is – and why you want me, now, at this time, to be Doeg?'

‘I am not sure what your name is, when you ask these questions, but it is not Doeg!'

She smiled here, acknowledging what he said, and sat quietly for a time, thinking.

‘Very well,' she began again, ‘but it seems to me that what I have to remember is so –
nothing
, Johor; and it is all over, gone under the ice … When I came to be aware of myself, when I entered into the feeling,
here I am
, I
was with my parents in our house. You came to our house once. It was in a little town, one of a group of small towns, all occupied with the production of cloth. Each town was known for something. Our town actually wove the cloth. The town across the valley made the machinery that made the cloth. On the other side of our hill was a town where everyone was involved with the production of dyes. Some were natural, which we had discovered for ourselves from plants and clays and rocks, but others were artificial, and it was Canopus who made us think in ways that led to the discovery of how to evolve dyes. Another town nearby made all kinds of yarns and threads. The cluster of towns grew like this, nothing was planned – and now when I think of all that time, what distinguished it was a naturalness in the way things grew and happened. But there was a change, wasn't there, Johor? There was a point when our lives, instead of being a function of what was around us, growing out of what was there, became more … conscious, is that the word? Can we use that word for a collective way of looking at – ‘

‘Alsi,' said Johor.

‘Yes. Very well. I grew as all children did then. We learned everything we had to know from the adults around us. And now I
have
to make the comment that it was unconscious, Johor! Both on the part of the children, and on the part of the adults! That was before Pedug came …'

‘No, before Pedug felt that a name was necessary.'