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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 ru
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 ca
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.