The making of representative for Planet 8

It is not true to say that we travelled easily, for we laboured and stumbled and dragged ourselves forward - but this was not because we contended with inclines and descents of mountains and valleys. Yet it was such long hard dragging work. There was nothing left of us! We were as empty as if scoured inside with wind as well as out. We were truly nothing but skin and bone and our poor hearts thumped sluggishly and irregularly, trying to move the thick blood through our drying veins and arteries. We were half dead, and how hard it was to shift forward these desiccating carcasses even a few steps at a time.

How heavy we were - how very very heavy... The drag on every particle of our bodies of the gravity of the spin of the planet was as if we were being held fast by it, and not merely by the thicknesses of the snow. Heavy, heavy, heavy - was the pull of our mortality; even though we were all as transparent as shadows and the flesh on our bones had long since dwindled down and gone. Heavy, the shuffling steps we took, one after another, making ourselves, forcing ourselves to move, our wills hammering there in the painful efforts of our hearts: Move... move... move... yes, that's it... take one more step - yes, that's it... and now another... yes, and now just one more... move... and keep moving... and so it was with every one of us, dragging ourselves there, among the clouds of snow that hung so low over the snowdrifts it was hard to tell what was air and what had already fallen from the air. We were half-ghosts, half gone, and yet so heavy we could feel the weight of us depending on the substance of our wills, hanging there, dragging - and what was this thing, will, that kept us moving up and on, into the high passes of snow, towards the other pole, the far extremity of our planet? In and through and among these bundles of bones and skin and already desiccated tissues, burned something else, will - and where was it, that pulse or pull in the vast spaces that lie between the minute pull or pulses that make up the atom?

Heavy, heavy, oh so heavy, we dragged and pushed ourselves; we waded and seemed to swim, up and up and through, and at nights we rested together, poor wraiths, while the winds shrieked or the stars talked overhead. When we reached where we knew must be the gorge where No

i had slipped, there was a clear fresh sweep of white, and the caves we had sheltered in were buried and gone; and when we came to the high valley between the ringing peaks where we had crouched to stare at the glitter of the stars and heard them rustle and sing, what we saw were the little tips of the mountains, hillocks merely, and if we had not known mountains were there, could not have guessed that they stood so tall and sharp. We made a stop there, as dark fell, in a hollow at the top of one of the small hills; and the winds rose screaming and we felt the snow thud and push and whirl all round us - and in the morning there was the most marvellous sight. For we were huddled between rocks on the summit of a great mountain - the winds had in the night cleared the valley of loose snow, so that we saw it as we had on our previous visit here, emptied. The winds had a pattern and a movement that filled this valley to the top, and then swept it: all over the planet the snow masses were moved about, piled high and then blasted away again, heaped up and then whisked off by gales to be dumped somewhere else. We looked down at a glassy glittering icy place many days' walking across and very deep, between enormous icy black peaks. All we looked at had a glassy awfulness that hurt into our dying eyes; and as we peered down over the edge of the miniature valley we were stranded in at the top of the mountain peak, we knew we would never leave it. How could we, weak as we were, descend the ghastly precipices of that peak? And so, for the last time with our old eyes, we sat close and looked into each other's faces, until, one after another, our faces shuttered themselves in death, and our bundles of bones settled inside the heaps of our shag-skin coats, so that, as we slid away from that scene, and saw it with eyes we had not known we possessed, all we could see was what looked like a herd of beasts crouched in sleep or in death high up there on a mountaintop.

We went on together, light now, so buoyant and easy in moving that it was with disbelief and with horror we thought back to our so recent dreadful heaviness, the old weight of us, each step or lurch forward against the pull and the drag that held every tiniest atom in a lock. Our new eyes had no steady perspective. We went floating onwards, free and light, and when we looked back for orientation at the carcasses we had inhabited, we saw only that we were among throngs of the most marvellous intricate structures and shapes: glittering crystals surrounded us, all different, each a marvel of subtlety and balance, each a thing we could have stayed to contemplate and wonder over... yet there were myriads of them, they came floating and drifting all about us, and, as our eyes kept changing their capacity, sometimes these crystals seemed enormous, as large as we were, and sometimes small. It was not at once that we understood that these multitudes of infinitely various shapes were snowflakes; that were, or had recently been, our enemy: it was by the agency of such loveliness that our little planet had slowly been done to death. But we had not suspected it, had not known when we stretched out a hand to let a white flake settle there, so that we might show it to our children: 'See? That is snow! That is the water vapour that is always in the air around us in a new shape' - had never thought that this little crumb, or froth of white, might be seen thus, as a conglomeration of structures so remarkable that one might examine them with admiration that could never wear out. Floating through them, feeling ourselves to change shape and size constantly, we tried to stay our movement, so that we could take our fill of gazing at these miracles, but that scene dissolved and went, the crystal structures vanished, for they belonged to some sphere or realm that we had passed through. Now, when we looked back to that huddle of bodies under their piles of dirty skins, to see how far we had travelled from that mountain peak, we saw them as webs and veils of light, saw the frail lattice of the atomic structure, saw the vast space that had been what in fact we mostly were - though we had not had eyes to comprehend that, even if our minds knew the truth. But the little dazzle or dance we looked at, the fabric of the atomic structure, dissolved as we watched: yes, we saw how those old bodies of ours inside their loads of hide were losing their shapes, how the atoms and the molecules were losing their associations with each other, and were melding with the substance of the mountain. Yes, what we were seeing now with our new eyes was that all the planet had become a fine frail web or lattice, with the spaces held there between the patterns of the atoms. But what new eyes were these that could see our old home thus, as interlocking structures of atoms, and where were we, the Representatives - what were we, and how did we seem to those who could watch us, with their keener finer sight? For, certainly as we changed eyes and ways of seeing so that every moment it seemed that we inhabited a different world, or zone, or reality, it must be that others could watch us, see us - but see what? If we had lost our old shapes, which had already disintegrated and gone into the substance of mountain and snow and wind and rock, lost those faint webs or veils or templates that had been more space than substance - if we had lost what we had been, then we were still something, and moved on together, a group of individuals, yet a unity, and had to be, must be, patterns of matter, matter of a kind, since everything is - webs of matter or substance or something tangible, though sliding and intermingling and always becoming smaller and smaller - matter, a substance, for we were recognizing ourselves as existent; we were feelings, and thought, and will. These were the web and the woof and the warp of our new being, though in our old being there had seemed no home or place for them, and we had imagined how love and hate and the rest had howled and swept and pulsed about in the vast spaces that lie between the core of an atom (if anything that dissolves as you think of it may be termed a core) and the particles that surround it (if a vibration and a flow may be called a particle) - and these feelings and thoughts made up our new selves, or self, and our minds were telling us that we were still a tenuous though strict dance, just as our old minds had told us what we were, though we had not had eyes to see what we were. Once, before we became dead beasts lying frozen on a mountain top, these layers or veils fitted into each other, had been a whole, had functioned together - but now one pattern had already sunk back into the physical substance of Planet 8, and another went forward, our eyes changing with every moment so that we were continually part of a new scene, or time. Nor were we something already fixed, with an entity that could not be changed, for we came upon a ghost or a feeling or a flavour that we named No

i: a faintly glittering creature or shape or dance that had been, we knew, No

i, the dead boy, Alsi's companion, and this entity or being came to us, and married with us, with our new substance, and we all went on as one, but separate, in our journey towards the pole.