The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Doris Lessing
And then it was: ‘They are at war in the next valley.’
‘War?’
‘Yes, the villages there have divided themselves into two factions and are permanently armed against each other.’
‘Has anyone been killed?’
And so it went on. For a long time. Went on even when something of the kind happened among ourselves. Families that had been braving it out on the ground level of one of the unprotected buildings found that snow had covered the apertures; and they emerged and went from one to another of the neighbouring dwellings – and were turned away. Were refused in one place after another. Until they took up weapons of all kinds, stones and sticks, and even the implements used for killing the creatures of the lake, and forced their way into a habitation. There they stayed, a hostile and defensive clan, in one part of the dwelling, setting watchers to report the first sign of hostile retaliation. They slept and cooked food and went about their lives as a unit; and they were in a large room separated from their enemies by a single wall. And these threatened ones came with weapons to throw them out, and did succeed in expelling them. And again the homeless clan went from one place to another, trying to force entrance. Scuffling and fighting went on, all around the different dwellings, in a thick snowfall, which made it hard for them to see who were enemies and who friends. Then when they forced entrance, the invaders and invaded fought in the dimness and the dark of the interior spaces. We Representatives were sent for. The Representative for Housing and Sheltering went in to them, and insisted on the clan breaking itself up into ones and twos, and dispersed them among many households. We had not before had to divide a clan, let alone a family. We all understood this to be a new descent for us into unpleasantness and even danger. For the clan was our basic unit, and we felt it as our strength, our foundation as a people. Yet there was no alternative. We could not build new dwelling places. We did not have the materials. We could only make the best use of those we had.
It was not only the dispersal of some clans that threatened us in a new way. There was almost a rebellion: the clan had obeyed the Representative, but only just. Very easily could they have refused. We did not have the means to enforce our will on others. We had never thought of ourselves as separate from them. We had not envisaged having to make individuals or groups do what they bitterly resisted. Our strength was all in our election by them, to fulfil what we all knew was a general will, a consensus. If there was no agreement we could not function. If this group had said to our Representative: No, we will not! then there was nothing we could have done. It would have been the end of our way of life as a people.
We all knew that. And the fear of general anarchy was what, in the end, made the intruding clan agree to dissolve itself and go quietly off, though not willingly, to new households.
It was a time, still, that soon we would look back on as one of innocence, when we had not known our good fortune.
But our main concern was not for the worsening temper of our people, but for the threat from the ice, which groaned and squealed as the thickening masses bore down towards us, piling up above the wall so that it seemed to us we looked up at a mountain that was moving. We Representatives went together to a place near the wall where there was a gap in the shelf of ice above, and we climbed carefully up steps that were crumbling and dangerous. The surface of the wall was friable, and was cracking minutely into a frosty crumble that we could rub loose under our fingers. But that was only the surface – so we hoped. One of us did slip and fall, almost from the top, but the drifts now were deep, and there was no harm done. The steps opened into a small space between tongues of ice that thrust forward on either side of us, and there we clustered and clung together, for it was hard to stand. And a bitter wind whined around us, spinning small crumbs of white so that all the air was thickened, and we could not see to the horizon. Below us our little town that had once shone whitely among green parks and avenues was now hard to map, for the grey sheltering hoods merged with the tundra so that we were looking down at an agglomeration of humps and protuberances that seemed as if the earth had grown them. Some of the taller buildings stood up sharp and dark, but the upper parts had collapsed in the blizzards, and had a splintered appearance. There were only small movements in the streets; few of the people went out of their dwellings now unless they had to. They had become a passive huddling population, sullen with inactivity, sullenly patient. They were waiting.
They waited for the moment when we would all be swept up and away from our dour frigid land to the paradise of Rohanda. Crouching inside low, dark, ill-smelling buildings, where all effort had become slowed and difficult with the cold, they waited. And, standing high there on that ice cliff above them, we peered through the dim skies and searched for Canopus, for the wonderful spaceships of our Saviour and Maker Canopus.
Where was Canopus? Why did they delay so, and make us wait and suffer and wonder, and doubt our survival? Make us disbelieve in ourselves and in them? What was the reason for it? Yes, they had warned us, and made us prepare ourselves, and they had prescribed our barrier wall, and they had taught us how to change our habits – it seemed sometimes as if this was a change to our very beings, our inner selves – and they had flown in this amazing substance that could clothe towns as if they were people. But we were not saved, not being rescued; and everywhere our peoples degenerated and became thieves and sometimes murderers, and there seemed no end to it all.
We voiced what we were thinking, that shivering morning, up on the ice cliff, we Representatives … fifty of us there were, and every activity or duty or work that we did (that was left to us now) was delineated there, by us. And as we stood there, looking into faces that were only just visible behind deep edges of shaggy fur, we could see the manifold purposes and uses of the old time, where now was –over and over again – Representative for Housing and Sheltering, Representative for Food, Representative for Conserving Warmth. And variations on these basic needs.
For we were keeping, and in a conscious effort, our knowledge of our own possibilities, our potential for the future, which had been so amply demonstrated in the past. We were not merely these shivering animals, concerned only with how to keep ourselves warm, keep ourselves fed – not just what we could see as we huddled there, trying to keep our footing as the wind tugged and shoved at us. No, we were still what we had been, and would be again … and where was Canopus, who would restore us to ourselves?
Again we made the journey around our planet, this time at the foot of the wall or cliff, not on it, as this was no longer possible because of its load of pressing ice. We stumbled through snowdrifts or over frozen earth, and our eyes were turned always to the right, for we kept the sun in front of us as much as we could – our poor weakened pallid sun which seemed now almost to be absorbing heat from us, rather than warming and nurturing us. Our eyes were at work at every moment on the surface of the wall, or cliff, for we feared very much that it would give way altogether. But so far, while every little part of it was crazed and crumbling, there were no large cracks in it. It was holding. This journey took us twice as long as when we had travelled with Canopus, and we were cold and torpid, and felt the need to sleep. Sleep … sleep … our minds found refuge there, and the need to lose ourselves in oblivion was a torment. We would sit pressed together, as soon as the light went, in some place where the snowdrifts were not so deep, with our backs to the great barrier, and we ate our tasteless and disagreeable dried meat, or roots of the half-frozen rushes: and we dozed there as if we were one organism, not many – as if our separate unique individualities had become another burden that had to be shed, like unnecessary movement. Yet we were in movement … alone of our peoples we felt some kind of restlessness, which had made us take this journey. While they dozed and dreamed away this long waiting time heaped together in their dark and frigid homes, we were still feeling a need to press on from place to place, as if elsewhere we could come on something that might aid us.
It was on that journey, while we huddled together as the light went, that one of us – Marl, he who had once been the expert breeder of now extinct animals – did not settle down immediately with the rest of us, but piled a snowdrift higher with his hands, making a windbreak that would save us from some discomfort. Marl had always been a strong and well-built man, and even now was able to move with some lightness and purpose, his movements precise, a pleasure to watch. We were watching: saw in