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When I was slightly recovered, I still was facing Johor, who stood with his back to a wind that came pouring down from the snow fields.
‘You are always travelling,’ I said. ‘You are seldom on your own planet – do you miss it?’
He did not answer. He was waiting.
‘If we are all to be space-lifted away from our home, then why the wall? Why were we not taken away when the snows first began to fall?’
‘The hardest thing for any one of us to realize – every one of us, no matter how high in the levels of functioning – is that we are all subject to an overall plan. A general Necessity.’
‘It was not convenient?’ And my voice was bitter.
‘When we took you for training to the other planets, did you ever hear of the planet Rohanda?’
I had, and my curiosity was already expectation – and even a warm and friendly expectation.
‘Yes, it is a beautiful planet. And quite one of our most successful attempts …’ He smiled, though I could not see his smile, only the change in the shape of his eyes, for his mouth was covered: and I smiled too – ruefully, of course. For it is not easy to accept oneself as an item among many.
‘Our poor planet is not a successful attempt!’
‘It is not anyone’s fault,’ he said. ‘The Alignments have changed … unexpectedly. We believed that Planet 8 was destined for stability and slow growth. As things have not turned out that way, we mean to take you to Rohanda. But first another phase of development there must be concluded. It is a question of raising a certain species there to a level where, when your kind are brought in, you will make a harmonious whole. That is not yet. Meanwhile you, on this planet, must be sheltered from the worst of what will happen.’
‘The wall, then, is something to hold off the worst of the snow?’
‘The worst of the ice that will come pressing down in great sheets and plates and will rise against the wall. Down there, where we look now …’ and he turned me about to face away from the cold towards the warm pole, ‘it will be bad enough. You may have a hard time of it, surviving. And this wall will hold, so we believe, the force of the ice. For long enough.’
‘And you do not want us all to know that we must leave our Home Planet for Rohanda?’
‘It is enough that one of you knows.’
It took time to digest this. Time and observation. For without my ever telling anyone at all, not even the other Representatives, it became known that we would all be space-lifted to another beautiful warm planet, where our lives would become again as they had once been – in a past that seemed so far from us. Though it was not far, only on the other side of the physical change in our lives that had been so sharp and sudden that we could hardly believe what we had been.
Johor and the other Canopeans left us, having made sure that all the gaps in our wall were well and strongly filled. And that no living thing was left on the cold side of the wall. It seemed a dead place, where now the blizzards raged almost continuously, the winds howled and shrieked, and the snows heaped themselves up and up so that even the mountains seemed likely to become buried. And then, standing on our wall to gaze there, our gloved hands held to shield our streaming eyes, we saw that the mountains had a glassy look, and that between the foothills crept tongues of ice. A few of us did wrap ourselves, and made little carts that could slide on runners, and we ventured up into that frigid and horrible land to find out what we could. It was like a journey into another part of ourselves, so slowed and difficult were our movements, so painful the breaths we had to take. All we could see was that the snows piled up, up, into the skies, and the packs of ice crept down. And, this expedition over, we stood huddled on our wall, looking at where we had been, and saw how the snow came smoking off fields of white and eddied up into skies that were a hard cold blue.
We had a great deal to do, all of us, and most particularly we Representatives. The physical problems, bad enough, were the least of it. Now that it had spread from mind to mind that we had a home waiting for us, in a favoured part of the galaxy, where we could again be congruous with our surroundings, a quick-moving, shining-brown-skinned, healthy race under blue skies – now that this dream had taken hold of us, our present realities seemed to numb us even more. And when we looked up and saw how the snows had massed themselves into packs of gleaming ice with great cracks that could run from one horizon to another – this present horror came to seem less real to us than Rohanda, where we were bound. When? We were coming to yearn, to long, for our deliverance, and against this I and the others had to fight. For if we allowed ourselves to lapse into daydreams and longings, then none of us would be alive to make that final journey to the lovely planet.
One of our difficulties was that when our peoples had been moved away from the cold, everything that had been built to shelter them and their beasts faced away from the blizzards. Standing on the wall, what had to strike us first was how villages and towns huddled and crept and hid away, and there seemed no windows or openings, for these were on the other side. Before, our towns had been spread about and seemed haphazard, as towns do, when built to catch the advantages of an amenable slope, or of a fertile wind. Now, as we looked down, a town might seem like a single building, in which one might walk from room to room through a valley. So vulnerable they looked, our new homes, so easily crushed, as we stood high there, feeling the winds tear and buffet us, knowing the strength of what was to come – and yet, down again at earth level, inside a town, it was easy to forget what threatened. It was sheltered, for the winds streamed above. All the apertures showed hills still green, and mountains green for a good part of the way up to their summits, and there was the glint and shine of water, and patches of misty blue appeared among the thick grey of the cloud. Down there was fertility and warmth and pleasantness … At the margins of the eye’s reach was our heart’s desire.
What were we to do, then, we Representatives? Force these people for whom we were responsible to look back – look up? There behind them was the rampart of the wall, so high from these low huddles they lived in that a third of the sky was blocked out. A wall like a cliff, a sheer black shining cliff. Still black on this side, though if you stood close to it and gazed into the shine that had once mirrored blue skies where the white clouds of what now seemed an interminable summer ambled and lazed, it could be seen that the smooth black had a faint grey bloom. Could be seen that the minutest scratchiest lines marred the shine. Frost. And in the early mornings the whole glossy surface had a crumbling grey look to it.
Were we to insist that every individual in the land climb up the steps to the top of the wall and look icewards, feel the threat of the gale, know what lay there always on the other side of the wall? We were to make a ritual of it, perhaps?
Often enough we, the fifty or so of us, would climb up there to look out and up to the cold pole for new changes and threats – and debate how to combat this weakening mood among the people.
Perhaps it was the extent of the changes that prevented us. A world of snow – was how we had thought of it. But it was ice now. The snow had packed, had massed, had gone hard and heavy. A ringing world – a stone flung on to it reverberated. It seemed to us as we stood high there, the wind in our faces, that a bird swooping past could make the ice sing and thrum. And when the blizzards came, the winds drove snow masses up into the air, whirled them around the hard clanging skies and dropped them again, to slide and swirl into new piles and drifts. Soon to freeze again and make new ice packs that came driving down the valleys towards us. Now as we looked out, we had to remind ourselves of the real height of the barrier wall by glancing down behind us to the sheltered side, for the snows were more than halfway up the wall. Quite soon – we joked – we would be able to step off the top of that wall and simply walk off on snow. Or on ice.
We decided not to institute rituals of snow-watching and wall-climbing, or make strong songs to combat the soft wailing yearning songs that now were heard all day and half the night. We did not really know how to assess the effects that such forced submersions in reality might have.
Once we had known exactly what would result from this or that decision.
It was in the nature of the new dispensation that the Representatives who had the care of the animals were now more important than any of us. Only down near the warm pole was it possible to grow crops, and these were of new cold-resistant varieties. We could now grow enough to feed people as much grain as once we did.
Our diet had changed, and very fast. The herds of enormous shaggy beasts who seemed to thrive on the new thin grasses and lichens gave us meat, gave us hides for clothing, provided us with cheeses and all kinds of soured milks that we had not before troubled to develop. A child was now weaned on to meat and cheeses: not long ago the diet would have been cooked grains – our food had been mostly fruit and cereals and vegetables. We wondered how this new way of eating might be affecting us. Canopus had the experience to tell us but Canopus had not been near us for some time. We would ask them …
The Animal Keepers and the Animal Makers called us all together to say that we were dependent on this one species of animal. We had learned – had we not? – how fast and thoroughly species could change … disappear … come into being. What guarantee had we that some new climatic shift might not kill off these new beasts of ours as quickly as the animals of our old time had been killed?
We were all together in one of our newly built places, thick walls around us, the roof heavy above. Very quiet our living had become, where we had been open to every breeze, every change of the light.
In this deep silence we sat together and measured our situation by how our responsibilities had changed.
The Representatives of the Representatives, of whom I was sometimes one, did not change their numbers. We were five, but sometimes we had other tasks as well. There was now one Grain Keeper and Grain Maker. The Fruit and Vegetable Makers had become Animal Makers, as I have suggested. The Food Makers had always been the most necessary of our Makers and Keepers. Next to them, those who built and cared for buildings. The numbers of these had not lessened, but increased. Fifteen of our fifty now concerned themselves with how to shelter our populations in this hard time. There were the Maintainers of the Wall. The others were concerned with the making of implements and artefacts of all kinds, some introduced by Canopus, others developed by us. Not long ago we had one Representative for the Law. Now there were several, because the tensions and difficulties made people quarrel where they had been good-humoured. It had been, before The Ice, a rare thing to have a killing. Now we expected murder. We had not thieved from each other: now it was common. Once civic disobedience had been unknown. Now gangs of mostly young people might roam about throwing sticks and stones at anything that seemed to antagonize them – often the base of the wall.
But this meeting was not concerned with anything but food. It was necessary to discover, or make, or plan, new sources of food.
What had we overlooked, or deliberately left unused? There was our ocean, filled with creatures of all sorts, but even now our sense of the sacredness of the place made us reluctant to look at it as a food source. I have to say that Canopus had never done more than remain silent, when we talked of our Sacred Lake: this was how they dealt with attitudes of ours they expected us to outgrow. There were a few of us who long ago had come privately to think that this sacredness and holiness was foolish, but we talked about our thoughts only with each other. We had learned from Canopus that argument does not teach children, or the immature. Only time and experience does that.
So when some of our band of companions showed signs of emotion at the suggestion that our lake should be examined, we remained silent, as Canopus did at such times.
There remained only what we had turned our backs on and what we so feared: the freezing wilderness. When we had made our observation tours along the wall we had seen that the great birds we so loved to watch had become a snowy white, were no longer brown and grey. Wings soft and feathery and white as some kinds of snow now balanced on those hostile currents. Sometimes we might see a great many birds, but it was hard to pick them out against the snow masses, and often showers or storms filled the air so that birds and snow together whirled about the skies. But they must be feeding on something … If we could not see any creatures on those white wastes, it did not mean they were not there.
It was decided to send a party of us to the cold pole, and I was chosen, because I had been to the other planets and had seen – though not from as close as this – landscapes of the cold. And two of the others had been on similiar journeys. I, Doeg, Memory Maker and Keeper of Records, Klin who had once been our best Fruit Maker, and Marl who had been one of the Keepers of the Herds that had become extinct were the three who had been taken abroad by Canopus, and we were of those who sometimes found our companions overprone to simple emotions, as in the matter of our lake, and we had long been close friends. The other two were young, a boy and girl whose turn had come for apprenticeship. With us, reaching the age of qualifying for apprenticeship had been the occasions of festivals and rejoicing. It meant entry into adulthood. But now, with our once various and always expanding crafts and skills reduced, and with so much of what we had to learn to do difficult and dour and sometimes savage, there was little joy left and too few opportunities, and this journey of ours was seen by all our young as something marvellous: the competition was keen. Such were our fears that we were reluctant to choose the best, but we did in the end choose the best. Their names were Alsi and Nonni and they were brave good children, and they were beautiful. Or, would once have been: as things were, they huddled yellowly, as we did, inside what seemed to us like moving tents of thick clumsiness.
Our trouble was that we were not able to imagine the reality of the savagery of the cold. Not even though we had made brief trips into that region, not even though we searched our memories for anything we had learned of other planets and their means of dealing with extremes.
We put on to little sliding carts supplies of dried meat – which we all hated, though we were hungry enough for it; hide coats in case we lost or spoiled ours; and a sort of tent made of hides. We all thought this small provision would be enough to keep us safe.
We set out in a still morning, sliding down from our wall, not troubling about the steps, which were slippery and dangerous now, and falling into a drift from which we had to struggle. And we had to fight through waist-high feathery snow all that day, so that by nightfall we had not reached our objective: a certain hill in which we believed we would find a cave. Our sun, which seemed feeble enough these days, burned us by reflection and hurt our eyes. All around was white, white, white, and the skies soon filled with white snow masses and the whiteness was a horror and an agony, for nothing in our history as a race, and therefore nothing in our bodies or our minds, was prepared for it. The dark came down when we were in a vast field where the snow was light and soft and spun about and made plumes and eddies. Our tent could not find a hold, but kept sinking as if into water. We huddled together, opening our shaggy coats so as to press our bodies’ warmth into each other, and our arms sheltered each other’s necks and heads. That night there was no snow or storm, so we survived it, though we would not otherwise have done. In the morning we struggled on through the soft suffocating stuff, and then climbed up on to a glacier of hard ice which was so slippery that we made no quicker an advance, though it was better than the thick softness of the snow, into which we were afraid we would vanish altogether. On the ice we slipped and stumbled, but ignored our bruises and our aches, and that night reached the hill in which we knew was a cave. But the entrance to it was a sheet of ice. We were able to put up our tent in a hollow where snow lay. It was made of ten of the largest hides stitched together, with the pelts inwards, and we laid down more hides on the ice, and huddled there till morning. We were not as cold as the night before, but the shaggy fell of the inside of the tent was soaked with the moisture from our bodies and in the morning it was solid ice – stiff rods and points of ice that threatened to cut us as we wriggled out, face down, into the new day, which was clear and free of cloud.
We had begun to understand how little we were prepared for this journey, and I for one wanted to give it up. We three older ones all wanted to turn back, but the two youngsters pleaded with us, and we gave in. We were shamed by them – not so much by their brave and shining eyes, their dauntlessness, but by something more subtle. When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitiful and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn such hardship, had to forgo so much that we, the older ones, had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we felt that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when a species, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in ways that we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and high – even if it is only in potential – to their children. And if there isn’t this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces.
We, the three Representatives, agreed to go on.
Because the skies were clear and blue on that third day we could see the great white birds everywhere, floating over the snows and the ice, looking downwards for – what prey? At first we could see nothing, but then, straining our eyes against the glare, did see small movements that seemed to creep and run in a way different from the smoke and the surge of snows moved by the wind. And then we saw little black specks on the white, and they were droppings; and then larger pieces that were the droppings of the white birds, which had in them fur and bones, and from these we were able to form some picture of the little snow animals before we actually saw one: we were on it, it was under our feet, and it rolled over in a pleading confiding way as if in play. A sort of rodent, completely white, with soft blue eyes. And once we had seen them we were able to pick them out, running around, though not very many – certainly not to be seen as a food supply. Unless they could be bred in captivity? But what were they feeding on? We saw one eating the droppings of the big birds … if the birds ate them, and they ate their own remnants in the birds’ droppings, then this was a closed cycle and hardly feasible – but there seemed nothing available for them to eat. We did see a few, a very few, snow-beetles, or some kind of insect, white too – but what did they feed on, if they were the food of the little white beasts?
As we planned to travel polewards for several days yet, we did not capture specimens but pressed on. Ahead I knew was a range of hills and in them some deep caves, and we hoped they would not be completely iced in. On an afternoon when the sky was a metallic dark-blue glare, we slid and staggered our way up a river that we knew was one only because we had enjoyed it when it ran between green fertile banks and was crowded with boats and swimmers. The sides now rose sheer up, cliffs of ice. To reach the place of the caves we had to cut steps in the ice, and the boy Nonni fell and hurt his arm very badly, though he pretended not to be much hurt.
Although it would soon be dark and we wanted very much to be sheltered, we had to give him time to recover. We sat down in a hollow in the ice, with our backs to the cliff and looking out over a coldly brilliant scene: a sharp blue sky that seemed to us cruel, defining the dead white of the landscape. We were breathing shallowly and as little as we could because each breath hurt our lungs. Our limbs ached. Our eyes kept trying to close themselves. Yet we knew that what we felt was nothing compared to the pain that made Nonni sit cramped there, breathing at long intervals in great gasps, his eyes seeing nothing of the vivid blue and white and dazzle around us. He was not far from slipping off into unconsciousness, and Alsi put her arms around him from behind, carefully because of his broken elbow, or shoulder – we could not tell what was broken, because of the mass of clothing – and she enclosed him in her vitality and her strength. To us three watching, the contrast between the two young faces was a warning: hers, in spite of what she had to endure, so alive and commanding, his all drowse and yellow indifference.
‘Nonni,’ she began, in what was at once evident to us as a deliberate attempt to rouse him, ‘Nonni, wake up, talk to us, you must keep awake, you must talk …’
And, as his face showed the peevishness and irritation of his reluctance, she persisted, ‘No, no, Nonni, I want you to talk. You lived near here, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Come on, tell us!’ He shifted his head from side to side, and then turned it away from the pressure of her cheek on his, but his eyes opened and there was consciousness in them: he understood what she was doing for him.
‘Where did you live?’
He indicated with a weak lift of his head, which at once fell back against her shoulder, that it was somewhere there in front of us.
‘And how? And what did you do?’
‘You know what I did!’
‘Go on!’
Again he resisted her, with an involuntary movement that said he wanted only to slide away into sleep, but she would not let him, and he gasped out: ‘Before The Ice, it was there – there.’
There was now the plain of snow, undulating, cut by crevasses and sending up small eddies and whirls of snow.
‘And you lived in a town down there, and it was one of our largest towns, and people used to come from all over the planet to visit it, because it was the only town like it? A new kind of town?’
He struggled to evade her with irritable shiftings of his head, shutting his eyes, but again his will to live came back.
‘The town was built there because these hills are full of iron. Under the ice here are the mine workings. A road goes from here to there – the best road on the planet, because of what it had to carry, heavy loads of ore, from which we made trucks to carry even more ore …’
Here he seemed to drowse again, and Alsi said: ‘Please, Nonni.’
‘Before our town was built and we began mining, there was no centre for making iron, though it was made in a small way everywhere. It was Canopus who told us to look for iron here, and what to look for, and then how to work it and mix it with other metals. It was clear to us that these metals we were making would change the way we all lived. Some people did not like what was happening. Some left our town again and went to live in other places where life had not changed.’
‘And you, did you like it?’
‘It seems that I must have, because I was going to be a worker in metals, like my parents. Both of them knew all the new processes. Just before The Ice I travelled with them, to a town not far from our ocean, and it was the first time I had seen anything different.’
‘And how did it seem?’ said Alsi, teasing him, for she knew.
‘It seemed to me charming,’ he said, full again of the youthful scornfulness he had felt, so that we all laughed, and he laughed too, since now he was able to look back and see himself. ‘Yes, it was so pretty, and so soft. With us everything was so much harder. Every day we had a new invention or discovery, and we were learning to make metals we hadn’t ever thought of. It seemed as if something quite new had happened to us, and we could not help but make new things and have new ideas. After that visit, I was glad to get back. And Canopus came again about then. Because we had seen how differently people lived in other parts of the planet, and we could make comparisons, we asked Canopus how things were on other planets. And suddenly our minds seemed filled with newness … we were stretched … we were much larger than we had been … we knew how many different ways there were of living, we talked about how species began and grew and changed – and died out…’ Here he stopped for a moment and was silent, a darkness coming over his face.
‘Nonni, we are not going to die out, Canopus says so.’
‘Some of us will not,’ he said, in a direct statement of something he felt, something he knew, and it chilled us. We knew then, or at least we older ones did, that Nonni would not survive.
‘That was the real change, it seems to me now. Not only that because we were making new metals and all kinds of machines we knew life on our planet would change, but because for the first time we thought in this way at all – and then began to think about how many different ways of living there could be – and then, of course, it followed that we wondered if we could choose how we would develop, choose the direction we would go in … It seems now as if what really happened for the first time was the idea of choice … And then there was The Ice!’ And he laughed out strongly, an angry laugh, as only the very young can laugh. The anger injected energy into him, and he staggered up, and was supported by Alsi. ‘What are we doing sitting here? Look, the light is going. We should get under cover.’
It was he who led the way up while we followed, watching him so that we could hold him if he slipped. But his strength held out until we got to shelter, though it was the last real effort he was able to make for himself.
We found under a deep overhang of blue ice a part-frozen dirt shelf, and behind that a cave with a soft dirt floor – and so long did it already seem to us since we had seen earth that we handled it with affection and in need for reassurance. Touching it released odours, and we knew that this was guano, or droppings, and looking up thought we could see bats, but there were none, they had been killed by the cold. Yet in this cave, with the unfrozen dirt beneath our feet, there was something that disturbed us, made us look continually over our shoulders.
We spread our pelts on the cave floor, and lit a big fire in the entrance, using the guano as fuel; and when the flames leaped up, and the smoke began to eddy, we heard a stirring in the heart of the cave, as if creatures were alerted, and were withdrawing farther and deeper. We kept vigil all that night, though in the comparative warmth of the place we all found it easy to sleep. We each took a watch, and all felt that a watch was being kept on us – we had a sense of being stared at. In the morning, we felt the lack of something that it had not occurred to us to supply ourselves with. We needed a torch. There was no branch or stick or anything that would make a torch. The daylight fell only a little way into the cave. All five of us, in a strong close group, went as far into the cave as we dared, and knew that not far from us were living beings. We sensed a mass of living warmth. Many small things? A few large ones? And if large, what? The vegetation-eaters of our lost time could not have survived.
Did the little snow rodents mass in what caves still were free of the ice packs? Did the great birds nest in caves? Was there some other kind of bird or animal we had not imagined?
It was with feelings of loss, even of anguish, that we left those creatures behind: this was because, of course, we identified with them. How could we not, pressed in upon as we were, so that our lives became ever smaller and narrower? We could feel for these poor animals, whatever they were, surviving in an icebound cave.
We travelled on polewards, but more slowly because of Nonni’s bad arm. He could not help with pulling the sliding carts, and Alsi did his work. And then we lost our sense of time, and of distance, as we laboured on, and on; our eyes burning, the exposed skin of our faces painful, and even the bones of our bodies protesting – those light elegant bones of ours that had been made by nature for easy and graceful movement. Over us storms came down, and we were enclosed in shrieking winds that never stopped, until we came to believe that a screaming of air in violent movement was what was normal, and silence or the soft stirrings of breezes and zephyrs only what we made ourselves imagine to save our reason from present horror. And then, when the storms stopped, and we found newly deposited snows preventing our struggling progress forwards, and the snow masses fled past overhead, our space in the world seemed shrunk to no more than our group of shivering bodies, so that we were in a white room whose walls pressed in on us as we moved and that moved with us. And when the skies lifted and cleared, and we were in a high valley surrounded by tall icy peaks, there was no life but in ourselves, our few small selves huddled together there. Again we could not put up our tent on the hard ice. Night came down on us and we did not sleep, for the wonder and the splendour and the terror of the place. Overhead a black sky, with a few brilliant stars. No wind, no clouds, only silence. We crouched there, trembling, and gazed up, at this bright star and then at another, asking if this was the sun of Rohanda, the fruitful planet, or if that was; and we talked of the race that Canopus was bringing up to a level of high evolution, and we wondered how these people, who in our imaginations had everything brave and strong and good in them, would welcome us and make us at home … and we talked of how we two races, these nurslings of Canopus and ourselves, who were also the children of Canopus, their creation, would work together, and live together and become even stronger and better. And we, the three older ones, were aware of the vibrant expectation and longing of the two young ones, and we felt for them all the warm protective love that a passing generation must feel for its charges.
How still it was through that long night, and how beautiful! The silence was so deep we could hear the small crystalline whispering of the stars. And, before dawn, when the cold was so intense our thick fleecy coats seemed to have crumbled away, leaving us naked, one of the high glittering peaks that surrounded us let out a violent cracking noise, as the icy blast bit into it, and this sound was echoed by another peak, and in a moment all the mountains seemed to be shouting and groaning and protesting with the cold. And then it was silent again, and the stars sparkled and invited. We did not believe we would survive the night, and in the first light that made everything glitter and hurt our eyes we found Nonni slow and heavy, and we pushed back the shags of fur from around his face so we could see the truth of his state: and his flesh was thin and yellow and clung to his bones, and his dark eyes had no answer in them. We were still a good way from the pole. I remembered that there had been a cave not far from here, and we carried him to it. He was so light he lay in my arms like a child. The cave had a small entrance, a hole in the snow; and there was no guano there. The floor was a hard greyish mixture of soil and frost, and we had no sense of animals watching from the cave’s recesses. We found piles of straw from – we supposed – the habitation of a solitary or a hermit, and with this we made a bit of a fire. But there was not enough warmth to save Nonni, and he died. And we could not bury him, for the floor was too hard. We left him there, in his thick pelts, and we four, wondering which of us would be next, went on with this journey of ours that we believed useless and perhaps even criminal, until we saw ahead of us a tall black spiring thing. It was the column that Canopus had asked us to erect at the place of the pole. But it was not as high as we remembered it, for the ice had reached more than half way up it. The columns were at the poles because the spacecraft of Canopus found them useful as markers when they came in to land.
It seemed to us that the sun here at the top of our world was hotter than anywhere on our journey. It will be remembered that I said there was the very slightest inclination of our planet on its axis, which had never been enough to make much difference in our good times; but now we wondered if perhaps, because we were in such extremities of climate, this small slant might make enough of a change to call it a summer, when the other pole in its turn reached forward closer to the sun. Well, it turned out that it was so: there was the briefest season of weather when a slight increase in warmth made it possible to bring on crops and cosset a few vegetables. But it could not be summer enough to change our situation.
Here at the top of the planet, with nothing around us but glazed ice on which we could hardly keep our footing, we had to acknowledge that we had not found anything that could be of use as foodstock, except perhaps the white snow creatures. Which did not live up here, in these latitudes – here nothing lived. And our small livingness, our slow and cold-confused thoughts seemed to us out of place, almost an affront to nature which had ordained only the silences of the ice, the shrieking of the storms.
On the way back, the girl fell ill and we had to pull her along on one of the carts – there was room for her, now we had eaten nearly all our dried meat. When we reached the valleys, where the small movement of the snow animals showed on the snows among the shadows of the great birds that swung their white wings overhead, we caught several. This was easy, for they did not know enough to fear us. They were confiding little beasts, and snuggled up to the girl who lay half-conscious on her bed, and their sweetness and warmth revived her, and she wept for the first time, because of the death of her friend Nonni.
Of the journey back there is no need to say any more than it was frightful, and every dragging and painful step told us how foolish we had been to match ourselves against dangers we had not been equipped to measure. When at last we reached where we expected to see our black wall, we did not see it. It was a blindingly brilliant glittering morning, after a night of snow that fell so heavily we thought we might be suffocated by it. Stumbling on, our eyes half-closed against the glare, we nearly stepped straight over a cliff – our wall; we had walked up to it at the level of its top, for ice and snow had filled in everything. Standing there and looking down, we could see that snow had been blown down from the cold side into drifts along the foot of the wall. Not deep drifts but enough to cover the earth to a good distance.
We climbed carefully down the slippery dangerous steps into safety. Alsi soon recovered, and she took the little beasts that had shared her cart with her to the Animal Makers, and at last, after much experimentation, it was found they would eat lichens and the low bushes of the tundras. But what had they lived on when they were in that wilderness of frozen water? It was at last decided that in the caves there must have been supplies of straw or leaves, or perhaps even some sort of vegetation growing. We bred these creatures for food; but our problem was, after all, that we were not able to grow enough to feed animals. The great herds, which had seemed able to thrive on such sparse and dry vegetation, were now roaming restlessly from valley to hillside and even up the mountains in search of food. If the cold was going to creep down past our barrier wall, then we must expect our grasses and shrubs to dwindle – and the herds to dwindle too.
It was this pressure on us that made our more tender-minded Representatives agree to think again about our lake. Our ocean. A ceremony was made of it. All the populations of the valleys round about, and delegations from every part of our planet, stood along the edges of our ocean. It was a sombre, grey morning, and the crowds were silent and grey. From where we stood on the low hills on one side of the stretch of water, we could see a greyish brown huddling of people around the far shores. We Representatives were on the shore nearest the wall, and we could see, far over the mountains on the other side of the water, a light greyish blue sky that seemed still to smile. Populations under threat know silences that they understand nothing of in lighthearted times. The people around me could be observed turning their faces about, to look into other faces; all were silent, or speaking only in very low voices, and it came into my mind that the reason for this deep attentiveness was because they were, we all were, listening. Everything we had to do was difficult and hateful to us, we were not at ease with even the smallest and most ordinary and often-repeated things in our daily lives, from the putting on of the heavy coats to the preparing of the fatty meat which was our staple food; not at ease in our sleep that was always threatened by cold creeping in from somewhere, a heavy weight of cold that seemed to subside into us, like water soaking clay; not at ease even in the stretching out of a hand or a smile, for our bodies and faces seemed always too light and friable for what they had to do and had to express. There seemed to be nothing left to us that was instinctive and therefore joyful, or ordinarily pleasurable. We were foreign to ourselves as much as to our surroundings. And therefore groups, and crowds, sank easily and often into silences. As if this sense, hearing, was being pressed into service in default of other senses which we needed and lacked. We listened – the eyes of every one of us had in them always a look of waiting to hear or receive some news, or message or information.
There had been some of us Representatives who had said that we ought to make of this occasion, the dedicating of our lake to usefulness and productivity, a ceremony of songs and chants, contrasting the bleakness of our present time with the past. The so recent past… it was only the young children there who did not remember our lake set blue and bright among the greens and yellows of foliage. What need of a formal ritual of memory? Our stretch of shining waters had been blue, and had been green, and there had been little white wavelets on it. Brown rocks had made diving places all around the amazingly and improbably coloured shores … living always in dun and grey and dirt colour, the hues of a warmed and fruitful land come to seem extraordinary, almost impossible. Had we stood here, we people of our stricken planet – stood here and looked at lively brown bodies diving and swimming in sky-reflecting waters? We had danced and sung around these shores on warm nights when these soft dark waters had seemed crammed with stars? We had? Well, we knew we had, and we told our younger children about it all … and their eyes, puzzling at our faces, said they believed it all as they believed the legends we had been given by Canopus to repeat to them. For Canopus had told us Representatives a thousand tales that would prepare the minds of our people for understanding our role as a planet among planets, and how we were cherished and fed and watched over by Canopus. I myself remember how, as a small child, I was taken out on to a hillside by the Representatives of the time, with other children, on a soft warm night, and shown how a certain brilliant star, low on the horizon, was Canopus, our fostering and nurturing star. I remember how I fought with my own mind to take it all in, how I matched the rustling of the grasses around me, the familiar warmth of my parents’ hands, and the pleasant smell of their flesh, with the thought: that shining thing up there, that little shine, is a world, like ours, like our planet here, and I must remember when I look at that star that it is a world, and my Maker.
I remember how I part-understood, partially accepted. And how the legends and tales sank into my mind and fed it, and made in me a place that I could enter at will, to refresh myself, and to feed myself with largeness and wholeness. But it had not been easy, that slow change, monitored always (as I knew, though with difficulty) by Canopus.
What our task was that cold day looking out across the grey water was to hear from each other, and to understand, that this sacredness, this untouched wonder of a place, which we had swum in and played in but never never desecrated – was now to be farmed as we had once farmed nearly all the planet. As we still did farm the small area around the pole that was thrust forward – slightly, only very slightly – into our sun’s fruitful light. Yes, we were making use of our slight, almost imperceptible ‘summer’. We would harvest from our ‘ocean’ the creatures in it, but carefully, for there were many of us, and not so many of them that we could take as much as we liked.
The Representatives for the Keeping of the Lake, its Guardians, named Rivalin, stood forth from the silent crowds, and got into a boat that was decorated and made as cheerful as we could contrive with our now so limited resources of vegetation – some garlands made of lichens, and stalks of grain – and sailed out a little way from our chilly shores, and stood there on the deck, holding up the new instruments, for all to see. They were nets, and all kinds of lines with hooks, and spears and harpoons. These last were because there were tales that deep in the centre of our lake were monsters. Sometimes people had drowned, though not often, and it was said they had been taken down into the deeps of the lake by these great creatures no one had ever seen. And which never had existed – or at least, we never saw them.
Something happened when the Representatives lifted up the new weapons, high above their heads, and turned them around to show us. A groan or cry came out from the crowds, and this sound, which had been pressed out of us, frightened us all. There were moments of wild lament. For what? Because our necessity made us violate what had previously been sacred to us? It was not only on our shore that this wild groaning cry rose up from the people. All around the edges of the lake, people had gone out in boats with the implements of catching the creatures of the water, and from every shore had come this keening dirge.
And when the brief moment of the lament was over, there was silence again, the deep listening silence.
Some of the people waited to see the first creatures being drawn from the water. We had of course seen these often enough, while swimming there. It was while observing them, the long narrow agile water creatures, shaped rather like birds without wings – though some seemed to use frail and small wings – that we had first been inspired to think about how creatures took the shape of their environment, were the visible maps or charts of what they lived in. Birds, both the solitary individualists of our new time, and the lively flocks of the old time, traced for us the currents of the air. And these water beasts, the lone ones, who seemed always to be the larger, and those who moved and swerved and fled about in flocks or crowds or shoals, expressed visibly the currents of the liquid which we could not see, any more than we could the movements of the air. The running, swirling, rolling, and spiralling of air and water would become evident to us as we watched their creatures.
But most of the people made their way home. We Representatives stood on a rise and watched these poor people, our charges, go quickly, almost furtively, as if they were afraid of being watched, or even criticized, into their dwellings. Criticized for what? In times of great calamity, it is unfortunately true that populations feel guilty. Guilty of what? Ah, but what is the use of such rational, such cool, questioning when faced with the sudden, improbable, unexpected afflictions of nature! Our populations felt as if they were being punished … yet they had done no wrong … yet this was what they felt. We had only to look at them to see it – how they moved and stood and searched each other’s faces for confirmation or reassurance. When they stood, it was as if an invisible burden rested on them, making them hunch their shoulders, and giving an obdurate suffering look to the way they held their heads. They huddled together, and they walked glancing about them as if enemies lurked. Yet we had never had enemies. We had not known, until recently, even common crime or criminals. These people, these fortunate happy peoples, so recently blithe and agile and impulsive and trusting of each other and of the earth they lived in and on – they now could not make a gesture or a movement without expressing not only fear, but a wrong – and this was a wrong deep in themselves.
We had discussed how to remedy this: if we should appeal, talk to them, explain, argue, reason … Why should you, our brave and gallant peoples, facing so well and with such courage these hard times that have changed so terribly everything we all knew – why should you look as if you had been condemned to atone for a crime? No crime has been committed! You are not at fault! Please, do not make worse for yourselves and for each other what is already bad enough. Please, think of how this new posture or stance of yours, as if at each moment you expect a judge to pronounce sentence on you, must be undermining you, eating away in all of us, in our deepest beings …
Thus the voice of reason. As we envisaged using it. But did not use it. Reason cannot reach the springs of unreason, to cure or heal them. No, something much deeper in cause and source than we, the Representatives, could come near, was working in our peoples. And of course in us too, for we were of them and in them. Therefore, of necessity, we too were being afflicted, if not at the level we could see so easily in our peoples, then perhaps somewhere deeper and even perhaps worse? How could we know? How could we choose rightly what to do and to say when we had to suspect what was going on in our own minds, had to be wary of our judgment?
What could we conceivably find to say strong enough to outweigh what everybody had to live with day and night: this knowledge that because of events unknown to us, certain movements of the stars (cosmic forces, as Canopus phrased it, though these words did nothing to lessen our bewilderment) were causing our Home Planet, the lovely Planet 8, to wither and die. Nothing we could do or think or say might change this basic truth, and we all had to live with it as we were able, facing perils we did not understand. But, in the future, in some distant time, or perhaps a near time, for we did not know what to expect, Canopus would come and take us all off to Rohanda the fruitful, Rohanda the temperate and the welcoming.
We did go off, we Representatives, to our meeting place, and we sat together, for the rest of that day. Sat mostly in silence. Once we had met in the open air, on a hillside, or at night under stars. Now we sat close together, with our coats kept on, under a low roof. It was very cold. We did not use fires or heating by then: any vegetable matter, or dung, or lichens, or even the earth which can be slowly burned, had to be thought of now in terms of possible feed for animals. We had observed the great herds, in their frenzied search for enough to eat, pawing up this earth that was half vegetable matter and eating it, though they disliked it, and often spat it out. But then they took it up into their mouths again.
When the Representatives who had been floating around the edges of the lake showing the new methods for catching food came in and sat with us, we discussed how best to use this new resource.
I shall simply say here that while the food in the lake did do something to soften our hard lot, it wasn’t much, wasn’t enough. While our populations could not be described as large, compared to those of some planets which we knew were numbered in millions, they were not small enough to be fed long from a moderate-sized lake. And while this food was valued by us, we did not enjoy it. How we hungered and longed for the vegetables and fruits and grains of our old diet … all our food was animal now, unless we scraped lichens from the rocks. We were coarsening because of it, becoming thickset, and with a greasy heavy look, so that it was hard to remember what we had been once. Even our skins seemed to be dulling into the prevailing grey, grey, grey that we could see everywhere. Grey skies, a grey or brownish earth, greyish green covering on the rocks, greyish dun herds, and the great birds overhead grey and brown … though more and more, when they came floating over the wall, which was grey now because of the frost that had it in its grip, they were white … light white feathery floating birds, from the white wastes beyond our barrier wall.
When we looked up at that wall, we could see how the ice had come pressing down and over its top. A dirty greyish white shelf projected from our wall: it was the edge of a glacier. If the wall gave, then what could stand between us and the ice and snow of that interminable winter up there, whose shrieking winds and gales kept us awake at nights, while we huddled together under the mounds of thick hides? But the wall would not give. It could not … Canopus had prescribed it, Canopus had ordered it. Therefore, it would stand …
But where was Canopus?
If we were to be rescued in time for our peoples to be saved, then that time was already past.
I have said that new crimes and violences afflicted us. The victims were not many, but each crime seemed to us an enormity, and appalling, simply because we had not known this before.
It is not easy to allot grief or self-reproach fairly and properly in this business of calamity, when it affects people so variously and insidiously. That the individual victims of a murder or a casual looting made us more uneasy and angry than when twenty people died because of a sudden snowstorm was not reasonable. Was it because we felt we were responsible for the violence, even though there had been no violence or acts of terror before this new time of nature’s cruelty to us? Looked at like that, no one was to blame for these killings, which were, obviously, part of the general worsening of everything. Once any death was a public grief, and a genuine one. We knew each other. It was not possible for a face to be unknown, even if names were.
But the change had begun some time back: when Nonni died in the cold, we did not suffer very much. We were too cold and too threatened ourselves. Alsi mourned for him, but not as she might have done once. No, death had a new quality, and one that made us ashamed. We could not care as once we had … that was the truth of it. Was it that the cold was chilling our hearts, slowing our blood, making us less loving and responsive to each other? A child died, and we all knew we might be thinking secretly: So much the better; what horrors is it going to be spared, this unfortunate one! Almost certainly more fortunate than we the survivors! And we knew we were thinking: One less mouth to feed. And: It would be better if children were not born at all, not in this terrible time. And, as I have already suggested, when a species begins to think like this about its most precious, its original, capacity, that of giving birth, of passing on an inheritance, then it is afflicted indeed. If we are not channels for the future, and if this future is not to be better than we are, better than the present, then what are we?
We knew what we had been: and, as the news came in of riots in another valley, food riots, or perhaps even for no apparent cause, then we looked up into our dreary skies and thought: Canopus, when are you coming, when will you fulfil your promise to us?
then Canopus came, but not as we had expected. A great fleet of her spaceships floated in by way of the warm pole, and landed on our tundras; and what seemed an army of Canopeans unloaded supplies from the ships. We did not at first know what they all were, for we were rejoicing over foodstuffs we had not seen for so long – all kinds of dried and preserved fruits and vegetables. But mostly there were mountains of containers with some sort of pliable substance, and the Canopeans said they were for insulating our dwellings.
