The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (14 page)

She thought about this, and soon nodded. ‘Yes. For of course children have to be taught what is necessary – and what is necessary has to change. All the adults were Pedug, for children learned, as naturally as they breathed, from the adults. But then there was a change, and it was when you, Canopus, brought the instrument that made small things visible – yes, Canopus, that was when a certain kind of naturalness and pleasantness ended. It was not just that you brought only a few of these instruments, for of course you could not bring one for every household, or even one for every town! No, you brought us as many as you could, but for every person on our planet to look, and to learn what it is we are really made of, the instruments had to be carried around from place to place. By Pedug. And for the first time children and young people left the circle of their parents and friendly adults and gathered together, as children being taught, at a particular time and in a particular place, and sat around Pedug and were instructed. And what an extraordinary, what an absolutely fundamental change that was, Johor! And of course you knew it was, and had calculated it all, and understood that what was happening must change the way we all looked at ourselves. For, once, children never left their own parents and relatives and friends, all of whom were responsible for them, and hardly knew what it was they were learning, for it was taken in everywhere, all the time, in every possible way. I, for instance, who know all there is to know about the processes of making cloth, don't know how I learned it! But when I sat in a large space, listening to Pedug who made me apply my eyes to the instrument, and made me look at what was there, and made me think about it – oh, then, Johor, indeed everything was changed. We became conscious that we were learning, and of how we learned … and this was at the same time as we saw the substance of our bodies, and found that it vanished as we looked, and knew that we were a dance and a dazzle and a continual vibrating movement, a flowing. Knew that we were mostly space, and that when we touched our hands to our faces and felt flesh there, it was an illusion, and that while our hands felt a warm solidity, in reality an illusion was touching another illusion – and yet, Johor, in all my life, which of course is going to be so short, and perhaps does not deserve the name of a life at all … but you are going to say that I have gone off again, I've not stuck to the point, I'm not doing what you ask! But Johor, isn't that in itself an illustration of what I am saying to you? I simply cannot keep my mind on what seems like a short and – at least at the beginnings of it – delightful dream …'

‘You lived with your parents in a house in …?'

‘I was born in Xhodus, which was one of four small towns that together made cloth. While I was small my parents were both employed in the processes of weaving, though later both became Pedug and were often away from home, travelling around our planet with the new instrument, teaching the new ways of seeing and thinking. I had two brothers and two sisters, and we were all learning the skills of our group of towns. As for me, during the time when my parents were taking me into all kinds of places and situations to find out what my nature was, I was taken to a farm, an hour's walking away, that produced fleeces for our cloth makers. I and my parents and the other children lived for some weeks on that farm, but my brothers and sisters were not attracted to any of the kinds of work there, while I was. I told my parents that I wanted to be Alsi, to be one of those who were engaged with the nurture of growing animals. And that is what I became, very young, for I often visited there, and agreed to be apprenticed when the time came at that farm, and expected to spend my life there. But then the cold came … and now all that life, the towns, the animals, the trees – all, everything, gone under deep ice. And I see it like this, that a dream lies there under the ice, something that had no substance to it; and yet it was life, was living, was a long, complex process of living that … But it was a good and real and honest life, wasn't it, Johor? Nothing that we need to be ashamed of now? Though that is an absurd way of talking, for how can one be ashamed of something one has not
chosen
– we did not choose our lives or how we evolved, how we changed. For we were changing, I know that now, even before you brought the instrument that we all had to look through and find that our selves, that the ways we experienced ourselves, were all illusion. And perhaps those changes were not all good? How can we say now?
For I cannot properly remember!
I talk to others who were young with me – those of us who are still alive, that is, or who still move around upright trying to work in spite of the blizzards and the storms – and we all remember different things. Isn't that strange, Johor? And so while we all agree that, yes, there were changes, and that these changes could be described by saying that an innocence was going from our lives, by saying that there was a new kind of self-consciousness, even before the new instruments came, we cannot agree at all about what these changes were. I say, Do you remember this and that? And they say, No, but surely you remember …? Johor, there is something intolerable here, you must see this? Must agree? Must – ‘

‘Alsi,' said Johor.

‘Yes. The house that I was born in was like all our houses then. We would make a house in a few days, and perhaps a hundred people would come and help. We had feasts and festivals when we decided it was time for a new house. A house could be entirely of reeds or slats of thin wood held together on string. Roofs and walls were always movable, so we could open and close them as the winds altered or if it rained. A house then changed all through the day, walls being lowered and lifted, roofs being tied back, and people came and went all day and all night too, for we did not have any rigid ordinances about when we had to sleep, day or night. It was a communal life, and a flexible one, and it was easy, and we were easy with each other – for I have noticed that since the cold, and the difficulties we have now, we are hard on each other, and we criticise and make demands, and punishments come easily to our minds though they never did before. That was what I think of most in our old life, how fluid it was, how adaptable, houses and streets and towns change as plants do, turning towards or away from light. How we would pull a house down one day, and the next another went up. How on the farm we moved the enclosures for animals around, daily, it seems now; how even storehouses and places that had to have some sort of solidity were always being rebuilt. And yet I remember, too, how when the new building went up for the machinery that had just been invented to weave cloth more quickly, we all stood around it and felt uncomfortable and threatened. This was not one of the familiar buildings, all lightness and slatted shadows and breezes blowing, that we could pull into a new shape by tugging a rope or pushing across a screen; no, it was built of stone and earth and had a thick roof, so that the old way of living of ours was already challenged, before the cold, before The Ice, and I wonder – ‘

‘Alsi, describe yourself, as if you were someone else, as if you were telling a story. Take some incident you remember, any incident.'

‘An incident you want, Johor! A little tale! How I fear these little incidents our memories store up! In our house came to live my father's mother and my mother's father – these two old people had to be listened to, every day, by somebody. We used to take turns to listen, as a task. For what was remembered was always the same. Both these old people would sit there – not together, for the old woman liked the sun and the old man chose a shady place, and in any case old people like the company of the young and not of each other – they sat there, and when one of us went to listen, out came exactly the same incidents, in the same words – a life. A string of a few incidents, always the same. We children would listen to these same words for the tenth, then the hundredth, then the thousandth time. A life. What was eaten on a certain day, nearly a hundred years before. What another had said fifty years ago. Over and over again. Memory … And so now you want me to create a memory that I will bore my grandchildren with – but of course I am not going to have any, so I am safe! Very well, Johor. I came from the farm one warm and pleasant evening, to visit my family, and on the way something happened I did not expect. I had not gone more than a few minutes' walking from the farm when I saw in front of me … I see myself walking there, a girl of about twelve. She is a tall child, rather scrawny, and she is wearing a bright green cloth tied around her waist, and a red cloth over her breasts which have just begun to show. She is carrying a present for her parents from the farm, of some dressed meat. The meat attracts some birds that gather in the air above her. At first she does not notice them but walks along, swinging her basket and very proud of how she looks in her new coloured cloths and her new points of breasts. Suddenly she sees shadows moving fast all around her on the path and on the grass, and she looks up and sees hanging in the air just above her the great birds, their talons bunched up under them, their beaks pointing down. She shouts up at them, and hears her voice thin and reedy, and hears the loud scream of a bird, and an answering scream from another. The birds are flapping now around her head, trying to frighten her. She feels the hot breeze on her cheek made by the wings, smells the warm rank smell. She will not give up her basket, she will not; and then a bird comes straight into her face, and alights for just a moment on her head. She can feel the sharp talons in her scalp, and she drops the basket and runs off, and looks back to see three birds settling around the meat that has spilled out of the basket. She yells at them all kinds of abuse. You filthy greedy beasts, you horrible things – and they are off into the blue air, their claws full of red lumps of meat, and her basket is lying empty and on its side in the brown dust. She picks up the basket and walks on home with it, already framing in her mind the words she will use to tell her parents about it – and because she did that, made the effort to choose the right words that would make of her plight there along the road between farm and little town a sympathetic and interesting thing, so that they all, parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, neighbours would come close and listen and perhaps say Poor Alsi, you must have been frightened – because of that, the incident stuck in the girl's mind, so that she can see it as clearly as if she were standing on the side of the road watching the young girl come jauntily along in her bright colours, and how the great birds came together overhead, and conferred and then allowed themselves to sink through the warm air till they were just above the girl, ready to beat and battle with their strong spread wings.'

‘Go on from there, Alsi. Remember what happened when you did get home, and when you had told your tale and the people who had listened had turned their attention to something else? Can you remember how …'

But I did not hear any more of Alsi's efforts with memory, for the door opened in a screech of wind and a messenger came in, from Bratch for me: my aid was needed. I was to become Bratch for a time, as Alsi had become Doeg, and I went out into the wind that was coming straight down from the lands above our wall in a continuous driving squall.

I stumbled through the loose drifts, holding on to the young woman who had come to fetch me, as she clung to me, and in this way we forced our way out beyond the edges of our town and into the empty tundra where nothing could be seen but the driving snow, and so, slowly and painfully, towards the next town.

By the time we reached there, the blizzard had ceased. This town when we came on it was near obliterated, the snows had been so heavy. We pushed our way through the thick loose choking snow, well above the level of the first layer of windows where, in some places, we could see movements and pushings as if creatures were everywhere struggling out of eggs. We came to a building where the snow was smooth and thick to the height of the first ceiling, but there was a tunnel excavated down to the door, and we went down that, into a room used for meetings and discussions, and now filled with people who were sitting – not lying in that half-death of lethargic sleep – and waiting for me and for others from near towns. For there was a new danger, which soon I saw for myself, for the whole company of us went out into a morning where a cold and pale sun shone distantly in a pale hazy sky. But our eyes were not directed upwards to this rare enough sight – sun, in an unclouded sky – but on the wall that ran just beyond the edge of this town. Above it reared the familiar savage crests and shelves of ice; but the wall itself was cracked from top to bottom, black on white, for the inside of the wall had not yet frosted and dimmed. That sharp bright black astonished our eyes, and we stood staring, and as we did the crack widened, in a groan, and chips of ice flew everywhere, even threatening our poor exposed faces, and clouds of snow fell from the top of the wall. And suddenly the wall itself bulged, and then the upper part of it was crushed under the awful weight of the ice above, and fell almost to where we stood, and the ice sheets protruded forward and ground down the wall still further – and then we were standing in the little central square of the town, with the glacier coming right into it. The wall at that place did not exist – had gone.

We all knew what would happen, and what the danger to our people was: for before they had sent for me and for the others who would become Bratch for a time, they had already been into all the dwellings of the town, urging the inhabitants to come out, and to make new plans for themselves, to move away from this now dangerous wall. But they would not move, could not be made to rouse themselves. The stores of stimulant frozen water, with the flowers and leaves shining in it, were neglected, and in any case only the few already active ones had made use of them.

We had to make them all wake up and come out of the dark caves their dwellings now were, and to think how to make new shelters, and quickly, for we could hear the groaning and screaming of the ice as it pushed and slid above us towards the weak place in our wall, which was collapsing fast and faster on either side of the gap that was now filled completely with ice.