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And leaving this little settlement half buried in snow, we went off into the town nearest this on the side away from that where Johor still sat listening to Alsi as Doeg; and found there that the wall was holding, though the ice was rearing up over it so fearfully that it could not hold long. And again we started on the wearing dragging painful business of rousing people up, and making them move out, and build themselves shelter.
And when that town was evacuated and the people 'safe' - as far as was possible - we went to the next... and the next... where we met Bratch again, Bratch the physician, at the work of rousing and reassuring, for all along the wall black cracks had appeared, and then the wall had collapsed and the ice had come pushing through, and people were being moved out of their towns farther away from the lands of the ice above the wall. And so we all laboured, teams of us, very many of us: we, Bratch, worked at saving minds and bodies. And there was not one of us who did not ask silently and secretly: Why? What for? Since these people will die here, in their snow huts, and only a little later than they would if they had been left in their own places and towns. For it is only we, the Representatives, that will be saved... but this thought, I could see, did not take root in them, the Representatives, just as, in me, it could not find a home, but was rejected, presenting itself back to my conscious thought as something refused. No, it was not a lack of justice that we rejected - that we, the few, should be saved when the others would not be, but would be entombed in a planet of ice - for justice is something not so easily understood. It was, quite simply, that there was something in the substance of the thought, in its texture and quality, that could not find acceptance in our minds. In our new minds - for we understood that everything in us was new, being new-made, new-worked, changed. While we laboured and fought and exhorted and forced the doomed wretches up and out of their saving kindly lethargy, we were being changed, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. And in the unimaginably vast spaces between the particles of the particles of the particles of the electrons and neutrons and protons - between the particles that danced and flowed and vibrated? Yes, in these faint webs or lattices or grids of pulses, changes went on over which we had no control. Which we could not chart or measure. Thoughts - but where were they, in the empty spaces of our beings? - that once we had regarded tolerantly, or with approval, as necessary, were now being rejected by what we had become.
When we had shepherded the people of yet another town, or city, or village out and away from the deadly wall which the ice was crushing, and into the white wilderness where only tiny ice huts sheltered them from the blizzards, and where they would be engulfed, sooner or later - then we were not able to see that our situation was any different from theirs. Both kinds of us, the people of Planet 8, the represented and the Representative - endured. The thought in our minds was that they were being changed by what we were forced to do; that we were being changed by their being made to stay alive when they would so very much rather have drifted away from our common effort into death.
So we employed ourselves, we, the Representatives, who were sometimes Bratch the physician, and sometimes Zdanye, those who sheltered and protected - for we did not think that we might properly use the word Masson, the builder, in co
While we were engaged in this work of moving the people, news came that our ocean - our little lake - was freezing so deep that it was no longer easy to find in it what food remained there. I went with some others, as Rivalin the Lake Guardians, through long slow snowfalls, which lessened as we went down and away from the middle lands until we were in a grey wilderness of hills and valleys, with the lake a white hard gleam, and we averted our eyes from it as much as we could, for white, white, white had again filled our minds and sight till we felt our thoughts were being blinded by its never-endingness. Yes, even these greys and the frosted rocks, and the soil that was brown and speckled with white crystals, were a rest to us; and so we came stumbling to the lake where we could see, far out in its centre, a small dark crowding activity, a bustle, which had about it a frantic urgency, and we walked out on the slippery ice, without thinking that we had never done this before, until we saw that a large hole had been cut in the ice, the size of a pond, black rocking sloshing water in a rigid white casing, and on this balanced most dangerously small boats that had lines and nets over their sides. All around this hole, whose sides were more than the height of the tallest among us, stood those whose task it was to break up the ice as the water kept thickening, and making a skin, and then flakes, and then thin sheets of ice. But the water was freezing faster than it was possible to break up the crust.
From the boats sparse loads of sea creatures were shovelled up on to the ice, and dragged away on sledges. Very thin supplies these were - the last of our food from our ocean. And I saw how some took up these still wriggling little water-things, which were fighting for their lives in the freezing air, and bit into them when hunger for freshness overcame them and overrode everything that was in them of restraint and abstention. I, too, was filled with a gnawing painful need for this food, and I felt myself being drawn across the ice to the edges of the pond, my hands out, my mouth filled with need, already tasting the crunching salty freshness - but I was brought to a halt before I took one up off the ice and bit into it. And others too, like myself, stumbled towards the food, but stopped, and we were all thinking of those starving in their ice houses, or going about their work, starving.
But what lay about us on the ice verges was not going to keep life in more than a few for a very short time -and, as we stood there, the sky came low in a smother of white, the snow began to fall, whitening the black of the water, and then there was no black, but a whirling black-and-grey, and, very soon, the water hole, or pond, was crusted over, and the boats were held fast. The people working in the boats were just visible as they put their feet out over the edges, to test the new ice, and stood on it, and then ran quickly across it, for it bent and squeaked under them, to the edges where they had to jump up again and again till their hands could find a hold on the ice cliffs, and we could haul them up. And there we all stood, for the last time as Rivalin the Custodians of the Lake, there we stood a long time, thinking of our sacred waters, under the ice, and what few creatures remained there sealed in, with the suffocating cold above them, and the white coming lower and lower, cramming them down and pushing them into the muddy bottom, and killing them as all their waters froze.