The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (17 page)

And, as the light went, for another night, three figures came staggering towards us out of the gloom, and fell among us, breathing deep and painfully, and slept for a time, while we waited. These were Marl, and until they spoke, we could not feel that this particular stage of our being together was concluded.

It was in the night that they came up out of their exhaustion, and told us the tale of the herds – yes, it was Doeg we listened to for a while, Marl as Doeg, and this was what we were told.

That multitude of great hungry beasts found themselves crowding closer together every day, as the snows spread down and around them, making a natural corral of snowbanks, a barrier that the beasts showed no disposition to cross, since all the food that remained to them on the entire planet was in this small area around the tall black column. The hay masses from the last summer did not provision them for long, and then they browsed on the wiry plants and the bitter grasses, and then on the soil that is half vegetable. And still the snow crept in around them, and soon they stood together body to body, many thousands of them, a multitude, and there was nothing to eat. Many died, and those that were alive were spurred by their situation into an intelligence no one could have believed possible to them – they pushed the corpses out of the mass of the living with those horns of theirs that were so heavy and, we had thought when we first saw the beasts, so useless: What could they possibly be used for? Yet these horns had turned over the soil, when it became necessary to eat it, had dug roots out of the earth, had overturned boulders in the desperate search for food, had been used, finally, to push their dead out of what remained of the usable space.

And then, for a time, they stood, facing out into the world of snow, all of them, their tails into the centre. And then Marl, watching from the hillsides, anguished at their inability to aid these poor beasts, saw that from every part of the multitude, small groups of them, and then larger and larger numbers, were breaking away. For days Marl watched how the mass that remained at the pole thinned, and still thinned, as the beasts left. But where were they going? There was nowhere for them to go! Yet they went. Lowing and lumbering, pawing the earth as they went, and scarring it with sweeps and scythings of their horns, as if wishing to damage and wound what would no longer supply them with sustenance; screaming out their rage and despair, their eyes red and wild and furious – these herds thundered up and away in every direction from their last grazing grounds, and then their going, which had shaken the earth, was silent, for the deep snows quieted the battering of those multitudes of hooves. The watchers on the hillsides had heard the wild lamenting bellowing of the herds as they rushed up and into the blizzards – and soon none was left around the pole, there was only the black earth that had been horned up, and fouled with masses of droppings, and eaten quite bare. And not one beast, not one. Marl, then, separating, followed the herds up into the thick blizzards, though following them was not easy, since there was no spoor in those heavy snows. But at last, each one of these Representatives reached the populated areas, and thought that perhaps the beasts had believed that here there might be food for them, or at least the companionship of people: who could say what there might be in the minds of these doomed animals, or what degrees of hope or intelligence were being forced out of them by their situation? But no, the herds had thundered up to the old towns and villages, empty now, and gone through them, not pausing for anything, except when some beast needed to punish and scar as had been done in the southlands, their old feeding grounds, and had raked horns into soil – so they directed the thrust of their horns along the sides of buildings and sheds and pens, and trampled down what they could, till the settlements looked as if we had destroyed them as we left. And then the herds had gone on – with nowhere to go. Where the wall had collapsed, making passes into the terrible lands of the perpetual blizzards, the herds had climbed up, and then stood waiting on the other side, white beasts now, their coats heavy with snow, their breath white on white air, till all of their particular group had joined them. Having assembled, as if this had been some plan worked out by them, they all charged up into the north, all together, bellowing and lamenting, to their certain deaths.

Marl, at various places along the wall, where it had fallen forward under the glaciers, saw this, saw the herds go off to seek death. And having seen it and understood, met together again, and then, knowing that there was no point at all in following the beasts, for they would have been swallowed up by the blizzards, travelled slowly down to where they knew we all would be. We, the Representatives, sitting on our snowy hillside, waiting. Waiting, as it turned out, for them, for Marl, who was no longer Marl, since there were no beasts left alive on our planet anywhere, not one, and so – elsewhere Marl worked, had to work: in other times and places Marl was and had to be. Marl used the skills of matching and mating and making and feeding and breeding and caring. Marl could not cease to be, since Marl was needed. But here, with us, on our cold planet, Marl was not. ‘And so, Johor, since we are no longer Marl, what is our name? For while I know I am not what I was, am not Marl, since I was what I did – well, now I do nothing, but here I am, am something, I sit here, among the falling snow, with us all, I look at you, Johor, you look at us, at me – and I feel myself to be here, here; I have thoughts and I have feelings – but where are they, what are they, these thoughts, these feelings, in these packages of frozen bones and chilly flesh? So I am not nothing, Johor, yet what am I? If I have a name, then what is it?'

And so it was with all of us, Johor with the Representatives, sitting there on our cold hillside, while the snow fell, it fell, it fell, so that we sat to our waists in light loose snow, and then the white pall was up to our shoulders – and first one, then another, rose slowly up out of the white as if out of water, shaking flakes and crumbs and clots of snow everywhere, and soon we were all standing, with the white drift up to our mid-thighs, and still the snow fell, it was falling with no signs of any end to it at all. We stood facing in to each other, looking into each other's eyes. There was not one word of Canopus, or of rescues – all that way of thinking seemed to us to belong to some distant childishness, and we could hardly remember, between the lot of us, how we had been in those days of our juvenescence, and now our thoughts were of a very different necessity. Then we turned ourselves so that we all, every one, faced away from the southern extremity of our planet, marked by the slim black shining column which, however, was beginning now to grey over with frost, so that soon it would hardly be visible where it stood amid the heaping drifts and flying clouds of snow. Our faces were to the north, and we began to move in unison, as if there was no other thing that could be done, as if what we had to do was ordained for us, and inevitable – we, like the empty and starving herds before us, were heading up into the realms of the winter; but it was a winter that would soon have covered everything, claimed everything, and our little planet would be swinging there in space, all white and glittering while the sun and the stars shone on it, and then, being all frozen over, with nothing left on it that had been living – what new processes would begin, once the processes of freezing had been acomplished? For nothing can be static and steady and permanent, it could not possibly be that our little world would spin there in space, unaltering, a planet of snow and ice: no, it would go on, gathering more to itself as a snowball does when travelling, or change into something else entirely, become a world we could not begin to imagine, with our senses tuned as they were to Planet 8 – and not even this Planet 8, the freezing one, but the old and delightful world of the time before The Ice … no, changes we could not begin to imagine would – must – come to this home of ours, but they would be of no concern to us, for we would not be here.

We moved on, slowly, with our faces to the freezing winds that came down on us, came pitilessly, not ceasing at all, day or night; we went on cold, empty, as insubstantial inside our thick coats as if we were already bones and bits of dried tendon and skin. And Johor was with us, one of us, and his eyes looked back at us, from between the shaggy fringes of his hood, with the same hollow and painful and peering way we all had to use – for the snow glare was in our eyes, and in our minds, and there was no way of shutting it out and finding a soft and companionable darkness where we could rest; for even when the dark did come down, there was so much of the snow-light in us we could not shut our lids, they would not stay shut, but flew open, as if we had the snow and ice inside us as well as out, and our eyes were windows that looked both ways on to landscapes of white, white, a flat hard white.

Half blinded, deaf with the perpetually screaming winds, numbed, dying, we stumbled past the snow huts and sheds we had built for the populations to take refuge in from the advancing glaciers – and did not look inside, for we knew what we would find. As we went through this zone, it was evident that soon the little excrescences of snow and ice, small rounds and bumps among the drifts, would have gone under the white, for already some were gone, quite covered over. And, looking back from the mountain passes that led up into the parts of the planet that had been so thronged with people, we could not see now where these ice settlements were – or had been, for the storms were so thick between us and them. We went on, the few of us, looking out as we went for our old towns, but the glaciers had come down over them, we could not see any sign of settlements or cities, though once we did go struggling past a room sticking up out of the snow, that had square apertures all around, and, in it, some sticks and bits that had been furniture but had been pulverized by the cold. This room was the very top of a tall building, and we were advancing past it at a level where once only the great solitary birds of the age of the cold had swung and circled. And, when we looked ahead of us for something like an escarpment or a cliff, there was nothing at all: the ice pushing down from above the wall had brought it all crashing and crumbling down, and in any case it was now a long way beneath where we travelled over the crests and billows of the snow. So we crossed over that famous wall of ours, the impregnable, the unbreachable, the impervious: the wall that would stand there forever between us and disaster, until Canopus would come with her shining fleets. We crossed it without knowing when we did, and were in a landscape where there were no mountains or hills, unless, they were of ice or piled snow, for all the natural unevennesses of the terrain had been buried.

It is not true to say that we travelled easily, for we laboured and stumbled and dragged ourselves forward – but this was not because we contended with inclines and descents of mountains and valleys. Yet it was such long hard dragging work. There was nothing left of us! We were as empty as if scoured inside with wind as well as out. We were truly nothing but skin and bone and our poor hearts thumped sluggishly and irregularly, trying to move the thick blood through our drying veins and arteries. We were half dead, and how hard it was to shift forward these desiccating carcasses even a few steps at a time.

How heavy we were – how very very heavy … The drag on every particle of our bodies of the gravity of the spin of the planet was as if we were being held fast by it, and not merely by the thicknesses of the snow. Heavy, heavy, heavy – was the pull of our mortality; even though we were all as transparent as shadows and the flesh on our bones had long since dwindled down and gone. Heavy, the shuffling steps we took, one after another, making ourselves, forcing ourselves to move, our wills hammering there in the painful efforts of our hearts:
Move … move … move … yes, that's it … take one more step – yes, that's it … and now another … yes, and now just one more … move … and keep moving
… and so it was with every one of us, dragging ourselves there, among the clouds of snow that hung so low over the snowdrifts it was hard to tell what was air and what had already fallen from the air. We were half-ghosts, half gone, and yet so heavy we could feel the weight of us depending on the substance of our wills, hanging there, dragging – and what was this thing,
will,
that kept us moving up and on, into the high passes of snow, towards the other pole, the far extremity of our planet? In and through and among these bundles of bones and skin and already desiccated tissues, burned something else,
will
 – and where was it, that pulse or pull in the vast spaces that lie between the minute pull or pulses that make up the atom?

Heavy, heavy, oh so heavy, we dragged and pushed ourselves; we waded and seemed to swim, up and up and through, and at nights we rested together, poor wraiths, while the winds shrieked or the stars talked overhead. When we reached where we knew must be the gorge where Nonni had slipped, there was a clear fresh sweep of white, and the caves we had sheltered in were buried and gone; and when we came to the high valley between the ringing peaks where we had crouched to stare at the glitter of the stars and heard them rustle and sing, what we saw were the little tips of the mountains, hillocks merely, and if we had not known mountains were there, could not have guessed that they stood so tall and sharp. We made a stop there, as dark fell, in a hollow at the top of one of the small hills; and the winds rose screaming and we felt the snow thud and push and whirl all round us – and in the morning there was the most marvellous sight. For we were huddled between rocks on the summit of a great mountain – the winds had in the night cleared the valley of loose snow, so that we saw it as we had on our previous visit here, emptied. The winds had a pattern and a movement that filled this valley to the top, and then swept it: all over the planet the snow masses were moved about, piled high and then blasted away again, heaped up and then whisked off by gales to be dumped somewhere else. We looked down at a glassy glittering icy place many days' walking across and very deep, between enormous icy black peaks. All we looked at had a glassy awfulness that hurt into our dying eyes; and as we peered down over the edge of the miniature valley we were stranded in at the top of the mountain peak, we knew we would never leave it. How could we, weak as we were, descend the ghastly precipices of that peak? And so, for the last time with our old eyes, we sat close and looked into each other's faces, until, one after another, our faces shuttered themselves in death, and our bundles of bones settled inside the heaps of our shag-skin coats, so that, as we slid away from that scene, and saw it with eyes we had not known we possessed, all we could see was what looked like a herd of beasts crouched in sleep or in death high up there on a mountaintop.