The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (18 page)

We went on together, light now, so buoyant and easy in moving that it was with disbelief and with horror we thought back to our so recent dreadful heaviness, the old weight of us, each step or lurch forward against the pull and the drag that held every tiniest atom in a lock. Our new eyes had no steady perspective. We went floating onwards, free and light, and when we looked back for orientation at the carcasses we had inhabited, we saw only that we were among throngs of the most marvellous intricate structures and shapes: glittering crystals surrounded us, all different, each a marvel of subtlety and balance, each a thing we could have stayed to contemplate and wonder over … yet there were myriads of them, they came floating and drifting all about us, and, as our eyes kept changing their capacity, sometimes these crystals seemed enormous, as large as we were, and sometimes small. It was not at once that we understood that these multitudes of infinitely various shapes were snowflakes; that were, or had recently been, our enemy: it was by the agency of such loveliness that our little planet had slowly been done to death. But we had not suspected it, had not known when we stretched out a hand to let a white flake settle there, so that we might show it to our children: ‘See? That is snow! That is the water vapour that is always in the air around us in a new shape' – had never thought that this little crumb, or froth of white, might be seen thus, as a conglomeration of structures so remarkable that one might examine them with admiration that could never wear out. Floating through them, feeling ourselves to change shape and size constantly, we tried to stay our movement, so that we could take our fill of gazing at these miracles, but that scene dissolved and went, the crystal structures vanished, for they belonged to some sphere or realm that we had passed through. Now, when we looked back to that huddle of bodies under their piles of dirty skins, to see how far we had travelled from that mountain peak, we saw them as webs and veils of light, saw the frail lattice of the atomic structure, saw the vast space that had been what in fact we mostly were – though we had not had eyes to comprehend that, even if our minds knew the truth. But the little dazzle or dance we looked at, the fabric of the atomic structure, dissolved as we watched: yes, we saw how those old bodies of ours inside their loads of hide were losing their shapes, how the atoms and the molecules were losing their associations with each other, and were melding with the substance of the mountain. Yes, what we were seeing now with our new eyes was that all the planet had become a fine frail web or lattice, with the spaces held there between the patterns of the atoms. But what new eyes were these that could see our old home thus, as interlocking structures of atoms, and where were we, the Representatives –
what
were we, and how did we seem to those who could watch us, with their keener finer sight? For, certainly as we changed eyes and ways of seeing so that every moment it seemed that we inhabited a different world, or zone, or reality, it must be that others could watch us, see us – but see what? If we had lost our old shapes, which had already disintegrated and gone into the substance of mountain and snow and wind and rock, lost those faint webs or veils or templates that had been more space than substance – if we had lost what we had been, then we were still something, and moved on together, a group of individuals, yet a unity, and had to be,
must
be, patterns of matter, matter of a kind, since everything is – webs of matter or substance or something tangible, though sliding and intermingling and always becoming smaller and smaller – matter, a substance, for we were recognizing ourselves as existent; we were feelings, and thought, and will. These were the web and the woof and the warp of our new being, though in our old being there had seemed no home or place for them, and we had imagined how love and hate and the rest had howled and swept and pulsed about in the vast spaces that lie between the core of an atom (if anything that dissolves as you think of it may be termed a core) and the particles that surround it (if a vibration and a flow may be called a particle) – and these feelings and thoughts made up our new selves, or self, and our minds were telling us that we were still a tenuous though strict dance, just as our old minds had told us what we were, though we had not had eyes to see what we were. Once, before we became dead beasts lying frozen on a mountaintop, these layers or veils fitted into each other, had been a whole, had functioned together – but now one pattern had already sunk back into the physical substance of Planet 8, and another went forward, our eyes changing with every moment so that we were continually part of a new scene, or time. Nor were we something already fixed, with an entity that could not be changed, for we came upon a ghost or a feeling or a flavour that we named
Nonni
: a faintly glittering creature or shape or dance that had been, we knew, Nonni, the dead boy, Alsi's companion, and this entity or being came to us, and married with us, with our new substance, and we all went on as one, but separate, in our journey towards the pole.

Who went? And what was our name?

The teacher of children was there; and the guardian of the waters; the maker and creator of grains and fruits and plants; the keeper and breeder of animals; the storyteller who continually makes and re-makes the memories of populations; the tender of the very small and vulnerable; the healer – the discoverer of medicines and remedies; the traveller who visits planets so that knowledge may not be imprisoned and unshared – all these were there, among us and of us; all our functions and the capacities of our work were in the substance of these new beings, this Being, we now were – Johor with and of us, Johor mingled with us, the Representative of Canopus part of the Representative of Planet 8, the destroyed one – destroyed at least for our purposes – for who could say how this lump of ice spinning in the spaces of the heavens would modify itself, becoming gas perhaps, on its way back to soil and a shape and substance that would be recognizable to the eyes we once had owned.

The Representative swept on and up, like a shoal of fishes or a flock of birds; one, but a conglomerate of individuals – each with its little thoughts and feelings, but these shared with the others, tides of thought, of feeling, moving in and out and around, making the several one.

What were we seeing there, feeling there – and where? In what place or time were we, then: what were we, and when? We did not see wastes of snow or ice, no, but a perpetual shifting and changing – we were seeing our planet in a myriad guises, or possibilities. We saw it in a flash or a glimpse as it had been, our warm and lovely place where everything had blessed us, and beside this brief vision, a thousand variations of the same, each slightly different, so that each one, had we seen it by itself, could have been judged by us as a stage in the development of our planet – but seen thus, merging so fast, and so subtly different, we knew that what we saw were
possibilities
, what could have been, but had not been, not in our space and time. But had been elsewhere? Yes, that was it, we were observing how, behind or beside or beyond – at any rate, some
where
or
when
– the various stages of development of our planet, had been so many others, the possibilities that had not been given actuality in the level of existence we had known, had experienced; but hovered just behind the veil, potentials, what might have been or could have been … Myriads there were, the unachieved possibilities; but each real and functioning on its own level – 
where
and
when
and
how
? – each world every bit as valid and valuable as what we had known as real. Just as once, I, Doeg, had stood in front of mirrors in my old self and seen stretching out in an interminable line of possibilities, all the variations in the genetic storehouse made visible – sometimes so similar to what I was that I could hardly tell the difference, but then more and more of me, each a variation, and a variation farther away from what ‘I' was – each one the possible and potential housing of this feeling of me, Doeg, some easily recognizable to my fellows as I, Doeg, and others so wildly distant that only a turn of the head or the slightest familiarity in a slide of the eyes or a set of the shoulders could say, ‘Yes, this, too, is of the family of Doeg, is Doeg's potential that did not step forward into this dimension or place' – so now we could see all the worlds that were not our planet, but lay there, lapping and touching it, each an absolute and a reality in its place and time.

Oh who then were Doeg and Alsi – were Klin and Nonni and Marl and the rest of us? What was our planet, which was one of so many? And, as we swept on there, ghosts among the ghostly worlds, we felt beside us, and in us, and with us, the frozen and dead populations that lay buried under the snows. Inside caves and huts and mounds of ice and snow the peoples of our old world lay frozen – the carcasses of these were held there for as long as the ice stayed, before it changed, as everything must, to something else – a swirl of gases perhaps, or seas of leaping soil, or fire that had to burn until it, too, changed
… must
change …
must
become something else. But what these had been, our peoples, our
selves
– were with us then, were us, had become us – could not be anything but us, their representatives – and we, together, the Representative, at last found the pole that was the extremity of our old planet, the dark cold pole that had been built, once, to guide in the space-fleets of Canopus, when they visited us. There we left that planet, and came to where we are now. We, the Representative, many and one, came here, where Canopus tends and guards and instructs.

You ask how the Canopean Agents seemed to us in the days of The Ice.

This tale is our answer.

A foreword on these lines almost got itself put in front of the third volume in this series,
The Sirian Experiments
, which novel came to be written as a direct result of nearly fifty years of being fascinated by the two British expeditions to the Antarctic led by Robert Falcon Scott, the first in 1901–4, the second in 1910–13. No, it is not snow and ice as such, but rather some social processes of that time and of this, so strongly illuminated by the expeditions, that interest me. But I knew that more casual, or literal-minded, readers would not easily see how
The Sirian Experiments
could result from preoccupation with polar exploration, and so I let the intention slide. And then the next novel, this one, turned out to be so wintry that no difficulty could be found in making the equation: a long immersion in polar exploration and a novel about a planet freezing to death. Yet people with an understanding of the creative – or, on the electrical analogy, the transforming – processes would expect just as readily a novel about deserts or about any extreme of climate or geography or behaviour. This afterword, then, should be considered as belonging to both
The Sirian Experiments
and
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
, though more to the first than to the second.

There is a practical reason why it is a good thing the afterword is in the back of the short book, though it was not planned. When I told the English publisher this fourth volume would be very short, he was pleased, and not only because this would mean less trees, paper, printers' work, ink, bindings, but because in this country there is a bias in favour of short books, much more likely to be good ones, and of real quality, than long ones, and this in spite of Dickens and all those wordy and indubitably first-rate Victorians. Whereas, when I said to my American publisher that it was so short, he said at once, mocking himself and his nation, but meaning it, in the way they have over there, ‘But you know that we can take only big books seriously.' So over there (or over here, according to how you look at it) big is beautiful, after all.

There is in Cambridge a building devoted to the records of the Antarctic expeditions, but I have not been there. Mine is not a systematic study, but the other kind where, knowing that you must have affinities with a subject or a theme because of the way it keeps appearing in your life, but always differently aspected, the way a landscape looks different from different parts of a mountain, you wait for things to happen: a book you didn't know existed found on a library shelf; a chance meeting with a relative of one of the explorers; a letter in a newspaper; or a friend, knowing of your interest, sends a biography seen on a secondhand book stall in Brighton. This way of studying means you may be unaware of facts known to even apprentice researchers, but if you keep facts and possibilities floating about in your head, they can combine in unexpected ways.

I first heard of Scott and his band of heroes thus. It was in the middle of Africa, in the old Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, on my father's farm. We, the family, were in the habit of sitting outside the house in the open, to enjoy the daytime or night-time skies, and the weather, and the view which was miles in every direction, a wild and mostly empty landscape ringed by mountains. The point is, we were hundreds of miles from the sea, and England was a long way off, and so in time were the Scott expeditions. It was nearly always hot, and the skies spectacular, either wonderfully blue and empty or full of the energetic cloud movement made by heat rising off sun-cooked earth and vegetation. Through the dry months forest fires were usually burning somewhere close. There, most vividly in my memory, is my mother, standing head back, hands out, in a posture of dramatic identification. I do not remember if there was an amazing sunset, but there should have been one, or at least a storm. My mother, choked with emotion, and radiant, for she enjoyed these moments, is saying: ‘And when I think of Captain Oates going off alone to die in the blizzards – oh, he was a most gallant gentleman!' And I then, with the raucous bray of the adolescent: ‘But what else could he have done? And anyway, they were all in the dying business.' I regret the bray, but not the sentiment; in fact it seems to me that I was as clear-sighted then as I have been since, and I envy the way that hard girl bulldozed her way through pieties and humbug, for there is no doubt life softens you up: tolerance makes nougat of us all. My father was not sentimental and, as always during my mother's high moments, was uncomfortable; and certainly said something like: ‘Oh, come off it, old girl,' and, to me: ‘Yes, I dare say, but do you have to be uncompromising about everything?' Yes, I did, and the reasons I did are not unconnected with the subject of these remarks.