The making of representative for Planet 8

And then, for a time, they stood, facing out into the world of snow, all of them, their tails into the centre. And then Marl, watching from the hillsides, anguished at their inability to aid these poor beasts, saw that from every part of the multitude, small groups of them, and then larger and larger numbers, were breaking away. For days Marl watched how the mass that remained at the pole thi

ed, and still thi

ed, as the beasts left. But where were they going? There was nowhere for them to go! Yet they went. Lowing and lumbering, pawing the earth as they went, and scarring it with sweeps and scythings of their horns, as if wishing to damage and wound what would no longer supply them with sustenance; screaming out their rage and despair, their eyes red and wild and furious - these herds thundered up and away in every direction from their last grazing grounds, and then their going, which had shaken the earth, was silent, for the deep snows quieted the battering of those multitudes of hooves. The watchers on the hillsides had heard the wild lamenting bellowing of the herds as they rushed up and into the blizzards - and soon none was left around the pole, there was only the black earth that had been horned up, and fouled with masses of droppings, and eaten quite bare. And not one beast, not one. Marl, then, separating, followed the herds up into the thick blizzards, though following them was not easy, since there was no spoor in those heavy snows. But at last, each one of these Representatives reached the populated areas, and thought that perhaps the beasts had believed that here there might be food for them, or at least the companionship of people: who could say what there might be in the minds of these doomed animals, or what degrees of hope or intelligence were being forced out of them by their situation? But no, the herds had thundered up to the old towns and villages, empty now, and gone through them, not pausing for anything, except when some beast needed to punish and scar as had been done in the southlands, their old feeding grounds, and had raked horns into soil - so they directed the thrust of their horns along the sides of buildings and sheds and pens, and trampled down what they could, till the settlements looked as if we had destroyed them as we left. And then the herds had gone on - with nowhere to go. Where the wall had collapsed, making passes into the terrible lands of the perpetual blizzards, the herds had climbed up, and then stood waiting on the other side, white beasts now, their coats heavy with snow, their breath white on white air, till all of their particular group had joined them. Having assembled, as if this had been some plan worked out by them, they all charged up into the north, all together, bellowing and lamenting, to their certain deaths.

Marl, at various places along the wall, where it had fallen forward under the glaciers, saw this, saw the herds go off to seek death. And having seen it and understood, met together again, and then, knowing that there was no point at all in following the beasts, for they would have been swallowed up by the blizzards, travelled slowly down to where they knew we all would be. We, the Representatives, sitting on our snowy hillside, waiting. Waiting, as it turned out, for them, for Marl, who was no longer Marl, since there were no beasts left alive on our planet anywhere, not one, and so - elsewhere Marl worked, had to work: in other times and places Marl was and had to be. Marl used the skills of matching and mating and making and feeding and breeding and caring. Marl could not cease to be, since Marl was needed. But here, with us, on our cold planet, Marl was not. 'And so, Johor, since we are no longer Marl, what is our name? For while I know I am not what I was, am not Marl, since I was what I did - well, now I do nothing, but here I am, am something, I sit here, among the falling snow, with us all, I look at you, Johor, you look at us, at me -and I feel myself to be here, here; I have thoughts and I have feelings - but where are they, what are they, these thoughts, these feelings, in these packages of frozen bones and chilly flesh? So I am not nothing, Johor, yet what am I? If I have a name, then what is it?'

And so it was with all of us, Johor with the Representatives, sitting there on our cold hillside, while the snow fell, it fell, it fell, so that we sat to our waists in light loose snow, and then the white pall was up to our shoulders - and first one, then another, rose slowly up out of the white as if out of water, shaking flakes and crumbs and clots of snow everywhere, and soon we were all standing, with the white drift up to our mid-thighs, and still the snow fell, it was falling with no signs of any end to it at all. We stood facing in to each other, looking into each other's eyes. There was not one word of Canopus, or of rescues - all that way of thinking seemed to us to belong to some distant childishness, and we could hardly remember, between the lot of us, how we had been in those days of our juvenescence, and now our thoughts were of a very different necessity. Then we turned ourselves so that we all, every one, faced away from the southern extremity of our planet, marked by the slim black shining column which, however, was begi

ing now to grey over with frost, so that soon it would hardly be visible where it stood amid the heaping drifts and flying clouds of snow. Our faces were to the north, and we began to move in unison, as if there was no other thing that could be done, as if what we had to do was ordained for us, and inevitable - we, like the empty and starving herds before us, were heading up into the realms of the winter; but it was a winter that would soon have covered everything, claimed everything, and our little planet would be swinging there in space, all white and glittering while the sun and the stars shone on it, and then, being all frozen over, with nothing left on it that had been living - what new processes would begin, once the processes of freezing had been acomplished? For nothing can be static and steady and permanent, it could not possibly be that our little world would spin there in space, unaltering, a planet of snow and ice: no, it would go on, gathering more to itself as a snowball does when travelling, or change into something else entirely, become a world we could not begin to imagine, with our senses tuned as they were to Planet 8 - and not even this Planet 8, the freezing one, but the old and delightful world of the time before The Ice... no, changes we could not begin to imagine would - must - come to this home of ours, but they would be of no concern to us, for we would not be here.

We moved on, slowly, with our faces to the freezing winds that came down on us, came pitilessly, not ceasing at all, day or night; we went on cold, empty, as insubstantial inside our thick coats as if we were already bones and bits of dried tendon and skin. And Johor was with us, one of us, and his eyes looked back at us, from between the shaggy fringes of his hood, with the same hollow and painful and peering way we all had to use -for the snow glare was in our eyes, and in our minds, and there was no way of shutting it out and finding a soft and companionable darkness where we could rest; for even when the dark did come down, there was so much of the snow-light in us we could not shut our lids, they would not stay shut, but flew open, as if we had the snow and ice inside us as well as out, and our eyes were windows that looked both ways on to landscapes of white, white, a flat hard white.

Half blinded, deaf with the perpetually screaming winds, numbed, dying, we stumbled past the snow huts and sheds we had built for the populations to take refuge in from the advancing glaciers - and did not look inside, for we knew what we would find. As we went through this zone, it was evident that soon the little excrescences of snow and ice, small rounds and bumps among the drifts, would have gone under the white, for already some were gone, quite covered over. And, looking back from the mountain passes that led up into the parts of the planet that had been so thronged with people, we could not see now where these ice settlements were - or had been, for the storms were so thick between us and them. We went on, the few of us, looking out as we went for our old towns, but the glaciers had come down over them, we could not see any sign of settlements or cities, though once we did go struggling past a room sticking up out of the snow, that had square apertures all around, and, in it, some sticks and bits that had been furniture but had been pulverized by the cold. This room was the very top of a tall building, and we were advancing past it at a level where once only the great solitary birds of the age of the cold had swung and circled. And, when we looked ahead of us for something like an escarpment or a cliff, there was nothing at all: the ice pushing down from above the wall had brought it all crashing and crumbling down, and in any case it was now a long way beneath where we travelled over the crests and billows of the snow. So we crossed over that famous wall of ours, the impregnable, the unbreachable, the impervious: the wall that would stand there forever between us and disaster, until Canopus would come with her shining fleets. We crossed it without knowing when we did, and were in a landscape where there were no mountains or hills, unless they were of ice or piled snow, for all the natural uneve

esses of the terrain had been buried.