The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Doris Lessing
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