Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    Ebook508 pages9 hours

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

    By Doris Lessing

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the fourth instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.

    The handsome, intelligent people of Planet 8 of the Canopean Empire know only an idyllic existence on their bountiful planet, its weather consistently nurturing, never harsh. They live long, purposeful, untroubled lives.

    Then one day The Ice begins, and ice and snow cover the planet’s surface. Crops and animals die off, and the people must learn to live with this new desolation. Their only hope is that, as they have been promised, they will be taken from Planet 8 to a new world. But when the Canopean ambassador, Johor, finally arrives, he has devastating news: they will die along with their planet. Slowly they come to understand that their salvation may lie in the creation of one Representative who can save what is most essential to them.

    Lessing has written a frightening and, finally, hopeful book, a profound and thought-provoking contribution to the science-fiction genre the novel generally.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateNov 1, 2012
    ISBN9780007396481
    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    Author

    Doris Lessing

    Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, and The Fifth Child. She died in 2013.

    Read more from Doris Lessing

    Related to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

    Titles in the series (5)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Humans Of The Anthropocene

      Jan 29, 2019

      Humans Of The Anthropocene
      4 min read

    • Article

      Purgatory Mount

      Jan 27, 2021

      Purgatory Mount
      2 min read

    • Article

      Lights In The Valley

      Sep 20, 2021

      Lights In The Valley
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Spaces In-between

      Jul 15, 2020

      We were just off South Cape when a voice came out of the long-wave radio and announced that Tasmania had closed its borders. Everyone stopped moving. Eyes like plates, jaws dropped to the floor. Coffee mugs suspended mid-flight. The whole catastrophe

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Change In Perspective

      Mar 31, 2020

      A Change In Perspective
      4 min read

    • Article

      How We Learned the Earth Is Round

      Oct 1, 2019

      How We Learned the Earth Is Round
      3 min read

    • Article

      Know Where You Are

      Jun 5, 2023

      Know Where You Are
      8 min read

    • Article

      Starshift

      Sep 9, 2019

      Starshift
      16 min read

    • Article

      Migratory Tule

      Aug 29, 2023

      Migratory Tule
      3 min read

    • Article

      Tongue Stones

      May 27, 2022

      Tongue Stones
      5 min read

    • Article

      More Than We Can Chew

      Feb 28, 2019

      More Than We Can Chew
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Last Line

      Jul 22, 2021

      The Last Line
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Age of Invisible Stones

      May 27, 2022

      The Age of Invisible Stones
      4 min read

    • Article

      Skipper’s Diary

      Oct 29, 2020

      Skipper’s Diary
      4 min read

    • Article

      Wild Prospects

      Aug 1, 2024

      THE deepening layers and meaning of a stone circle reveal themselves gently to me over time. Avebury; Stonehenge; Stanton Drew near Bristol; The Hurlers on Bodmin Moor; Long Meg and Her Daughters in Penrith; and Callanish in Scotland on the Isle of L

      4 min read

    • Article

      Dance Of The Stirlings

      Nov 28, 2022

      Dance Of The Stirlings
      5 min read

    • Article

      Svalbard Born Of Ice

      Nov 21, 2023

      Svalbard Born Of Ice
      12 min read

    • Article

      Antarctica: A Love Story

      Dec 13, 2022

      Antarctica: A Love Story
      10 min read

    • Article

      Voyager

      Nov 27, 2023

      Voyager
      7 min read

    • Article

      Charlie Walker

      May 5, 2022

      Charlie Walker
      3 min read

    • Article

      Sinking Into The Arctic

      Jun 4, 2020

      Sinking Into The Arctic
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Long Way Round

      Jan 25, 2022

      The Long Way Round
      6 min read

    • Article

      Uncontrolled

      Oct 10, 2024

      Uncontrolled
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Great White Escape

      Aug 3, 2023

      The Great White Escape
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

    3.5/5

    84 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      In her afterword to her novel Lessing says:“Back from the sociological speculation to this little book of mine. I can’t say I enjoyed writing it, for the snow and the ice and cold seemed to get into me and slow my thoughts and processes”And I have to say I didn’t always enjoy reading it. There is a soporific quality in some of the writing and Lessing occasionally strays into la-la land.This is the fourth novel in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives; her science fiction series where her imagined universe is controlled by the Canopians: a benevolent god like race or entities who strive to nurture planets and their populations in their development, however there are other forces at work who strive to disrupt this process. On one of these planets: Rohanda, which had all the natural advantages the evil forces of disruption were gaining control and Canopus renamed the planet Shikasta; the broken one. Shikasta of course is another name for our Earth.Lessing’s Conopus series is written as though the author was dipping into the archives to select certain key events and so the novels do not necessarily follow on from each other and can be read as stand alone books. This is especially true of The Making of the Representative for planet 8, where Lessing imagines a developing world where its human like population is benefiting from the knowledge and wisdom of representatives from Canopus who visit and make suggestions for improvements. On one of these visits Canopus strongly advises the population of planet 8 to build a wall right round the circumference of their planet and supplies the materials. It takes the population a whole year to build their wall and not long after it is finished their planet suffers a climate change resulting in an ice age. The ice and snow is held at bay by the wall and the population relocate behind it, representatives from Canopus tell the people that they expect the ice to eventually cover their planet but Canopus will transport the people to a new planet, the promising Rohanda. Lessing tells the story from the point of view of one of the planet 8’s representatives; Doeg who is the story teller and historian for his people. Much of the book is about the struggle for survival in an encroaching ice age, but Lessing’s style places the reader a few steps away from the intensity of the action. It is like reading an historical report, albeit one written by an eye witness. Conditions on the planet get worse and the Canopian Johor arrives to live among the planets representatives as they battle for survival. It appears now as though the promised airlift to another planet is not going to happen. Lessing indulges in some speculation on a sort of afterlife or transcendence into another mental state and there are passages in the book such as this:“While we laboured and fought and exhorted and forced the doomed wretches up and out of their lethargy, we were being changed molecule by molecule, atom by atom. And in the unimaginable 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 tolerently, or with approval, as necessary, were now being rejected by what we had become.”The vast majority of the people on planet 8 sink into a cold induced lethargy, huddling together in ice block houses waiting to die. It is only the few remaining representatives along with Johor who seek some sort of salvation. If it was Lessing’s intention to impart a feeling of lethargy and hopelessness in the reader then I think she has succeeded. It is a short novel of 161 pages, but feels longer, it is supplemented by the authors afterword of a further 30 pages in which she uses the story of Scott of the Antartica’s disastrous attempts to reach the South Pole as a sort of warning against Nationalism.The moral of the story; and I suspect there might be one could be that if we rely on God for our salvation then some of us might achieve some transcendence of the spirit, but for most people it would lead to our doom. Interesting to speculate on this theme, but you would need to be motivated by these thoughts and ideas to fully enjoy this novel. This one didn’t quite do it for me, Lessing has lost some of the magic of her previous books in the Canopus series and so 3.5 stars.
    • 3/5
      I like Lessing and I even like her sci-fi. When I think back on it, it seems a bit simplistic, but when I'm actually reading it, I find it engrossing. I've read her whole series (Canopus in Argos: Archives) and like this one the best.
    • 1/5
      This is a very slim book – however, it could not keep my interest long enough to finish it. Reading this novella requires real dedication, because it has no chapters and no breaks.

      Planet 8 is besieged by drastic climate change, and the inhabitants change their entire society on the advice of Canopus, another, more advanced race. The buildup was incredibly slow, and I frequently found my eyes sliding off the page. I finally gave up when I found myself grinding my teeth at the thought of picking up the book again.
    • 5/5
      I have only read two works by Doris Lessing; the Cleft and this one. Both are described as being of the sci-fi genre and my reaction to them could hardly be more at variance. The Cleft, I found, to be a silly story that added nothing to my knowledge of the human condition, this book held me riveted from beginning to end. I even approve of the afterword: a much superior cousin to the foreword, which tells one what to think of a book before one has read it. The afterword adds to one's enjoyment - I'll freely admit that I had not linked this story to that of Scott but, having Ben told, I can see the link. Were this to have Ben pointed out before I had made my assessment of the tale, I would have spent too much time and effort on looking for this link.In direct contrast with the Cleft,the characters of this book, although ostensibly alien, were so much more human, believable and realistic. I must now find more of Lessing's work so that I may judge which book is the standard, in my humble opinion.
    • 2/5
      This is the story of a planet that’s dying due to climate change. It’s basically the tale of a society, with the individuals pretty much interchangeable. There’s very little dialogue, although the characters do raise some philosophical points in long monologues. I wouldn’t really call it a novel, it’s more of a rumination.

      Is it worth reading? If you’re in that sort of mood. If you’re tired of ordinary novels, and want to branch out into more experimental fiction. There is something haunting about all these people struggling against the elements, slowly dying as the planet dies, and then carrying on, out-of-body.
    • 3/5
      I know nothing about Doris Lessing other than the fact she was a Nobel Prize winner before buying this - a random purchase. It's a kind of sci fi novel, about a group of people (beings? never know how to write about sci-fi!) put on a planet by a superior race. The climate changes, and, without wanting to spoil the ending, everyone and everything dies. I'm quite sure this is supposed to work on a level that I just didn't get. Still the writing was enjoyable (if such a thing can be said about a story like this). I'm sure there are better places to start if you want to read Lessing.
    • 4/5
      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.Planet 8 in the Canopean Empire was a paradise and its people were happy, until an unprecedented snowfall ushers in a dramatic climate change. The Representatives try to keep things going and help their everyone to adapt to the new conditions, but they are fighting a losing battle. Canopus helped them adapt their houses and promised to bring ships to evacuate them to Rohanda, but then the unthinkable happens. They realise that Canopus doesn't have everything under control after all. and there will be no evacuation.A short, sad book. So sad, in fact, that I may be giving it less stars than it deserves, just because I found it depressing.
    • 5/5
      This short novel is about stoicism in the face of disaster, and also about the nature of representation. It is told from the p.o.v. of a member of a simple agrarian race under the tutelage of the wise, all-knowing Canopeans, and the crisis of faith they pass through when their mentors and protectors cannot save them from planetary catastrophe. Lessing keeps the prose simple, thus giving it all the more impact. At the end, when the few survivors of Planet 8 undergo a form of transcendence to become Representatives, the simplicity is almost heart-breaking. Lessing appends an afterword about an all-female Antarctic expedition that was her inspiration.The novel was later adapted into an opera by Philip Glass. That is also stunning.Strangely, I have found this novel significant in developing my own thinking about the nature of representative democracy. I don't think that was Lessing's intention, though.
    • 4/5
      The shortest of the Archives, but possibly one of the most difficult, Planet 8 is dying, crushed under a weight of ice. The peoples of planet 8 are a result of a canopean plan, their destiny to colonize Rohanda/Shikasta. The canopeans seem to move from their benevolent role, to a more lasiez fair voyueristic role.At times the plot seems pretty thin, but the writing pulls through that with ease and you are left pondering the events.Still a solid read, and it will be intresting to look back over the series and see how it all fits
    • 4/5
      Planet 8 has a problem. Almost the entire planet is a temperate zone, where it is easy to live, where it never snows. But now it's getting colder and colder. The things they used to grow to eat won't grow. The ice caps are advancing. Canopus comes to help, but can they really do anything for Planet 8? The answer is both yes and no...One of the shortest books of this series, and to me the most disturbing.

    Book preview

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 - Doris Lessing

    DORIS LESSING

    CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES

    THE MAKING

    OF THE

    REPRESENTATIVE

    FOR PLANET 8

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

    Afterword

    About the Author

    By the Same Author

    Read On

    The Grass is Singing

    The Golden Notebook

    The Good Terrorist

    Love, Again

    The Fifth Child

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 is the fourth in a series of novels with the overall title ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’; the first is Shikasta (1979); the second The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980); the third The Sirian Experiments (1981); and the fifth The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983).

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

    You ask how the Canopean Agents seemed to us in the times of The Ice.

    It was usually Johor who came, but whichever one of them it was, arrived without prior warning and apparently casually, stayed for a short or a long time, and during these agreeable visits – for we always looked forward to them – gave us advice, showed us how we could more effectively use the resources of our planet, suggested devices, methods, techniques. And then left without saying when we might expect to see Canopus again.

    The Canopean Agents were not much unlike each other. I and the few others who had been taken to other Colonized Planets for instruction or training of various kinds knew that the officials of the Canopean Colonial Service were to be recognized by an authority they all had. But this was an expression of inner qualities, and not of a position in a hierarchy. On these other planets the Canopeans were always distinguishable from the natives, once we had learned what to look for. And this made us more aware of what it was they brought to our own Planet 8.

    Everything on Planet 8 that had been planned, built, made – everything that was not natural – was according to their specifications. The presence of our kind on the planet was because of them: because of Canopus. They had brought us here, a species created by them from stock originating on several planets.

    Therefore it is not accurate to talk of obedience: does one talk of obeying when it is a question of one’s origin, and existence?

    Or talk of rebellion …

    There was once a near rebellion.

    It was when Johor said we should circle our little globe with a tall thick wall, and brought instructions in how to make building substances not then known by us. We had to mix chemicals in certain proportions with our own crushed local stones. To make this wall would take all our strength, all our effort, and all our resources for a long time.

    We pointed this out: as if it were likely Canopus did not already know it! This was our protest, for we called it that, among ourselves. And it was the limit of our ‘rebellion’. Johor’s smiling silence told us that a wall would have to be built.

    What for?

    We would find out, was the reply.

    By the time the wall was completed, those who had been infants when it was started were old – I was one of them; and their children’s children saw the ceremony when the last slab of shining black was swung into place on top of a construction fifty times as high as our tallest building, and with a breadth to match.

    It was a marvel, this wall.

    The black thing that circled our globe – though not at its widest part, not at its middle, a fact that made us question and doubt even more – drew us to it, attracted our minds and imaginations, absorbed us. Always were to be seen knots and groups and crowds of us, standing along its top; or on the observation platforms that had been placed all along it, for this purpose; or on high ground that overlooked it – high ground at a distance, for nothing near could give us an ample enough view. We were there in the early mornings when our sun flashed out over it, or at midday, when the glistening black flashed back light and colour to the sky, and at night, when the brilliant clustering stars of Planet 8 seemed to shine forth from within it as from dark water. Our planet did not have moons.

    This wall had become our achievement, our progress, our summing up and definition: we were no longer developing in other ways, our wealth did not increase. We no longer expected, as we had in the past, always to be augmenting our resources: always to be making more subtle and fine and inventive our ways of living.

    A wall. A great black shining wall. A useless wall.

    Johor, the others who came, said: Wait, you will see, you will find out, you must trust us.

    Their visits became more frequent, and their instructions were not always to do with the wall, and the nature and purposes of what we had to do were not easy to understand.

    We knew that we had ceased to understand. We had understood – or believed we had – what Canopus wanted for us, and from us: we had been taking part, under their provision, in a long, slow progress upwards in civilization.

    During this period of change, while our expectations for ourselves and our children were being tempered, our world continued mild in climate, and agreeable, and very beautiful. As always, we continued to grow more crops and beasts than we needed, and exchanged these with other near planets for their surpluses. Our population remained at the exact level required of us by Canopus. Our wealth was not increasing but we were not poor. We had never suffered harshness or threat.

    We were a favoured planet, climatically, physically. Other planets suffered extremes of climate, knew heat that flayed and withered, and cold that kept great parts of them uninhabitable. Planet 8’s position from its sun was such that along a narrow central zone there was heat, and sometimes discomfort. Temperate zones spread on either side. At the poles were frigid regions: but these were very small. The planet did not incline on its axis, or only so little that it made no difference. We did not have seasons as we knew other planets did.

    In the regions where we all lived, there was never snow or ice.

    We would tell our children: ‘If you travel as far as you can that way, as far as you can that way, you will come to places that lie more distant from our sun than we do. You will find thick water, not light and quick-moving as it is with us. The water is slow with cold, and on its surface it wrinkles as it moves, or even, sometimes, makes plates or flakes that are solid. This is ice.’

    When, rarely, storms brought lumps of ice from the sky, a great thing was made of it; we called our children; we said: ‘Look, this is ice! At the poles of our world the cold slow water sometimes makes this substance, you might walk half a day and see no water that was not in this form: white, solid, glistening.’

    And, when they were older: ‘On some other planets as much of their surface is ice as on our planet is vegetation and fruitfulness.’

    We would say to them: ‘On our planet, in those regions lying back from the sun, sometimes from the sky fall small white flakes so light and so delicate you can blow them about and around with a breath. This is snow, this is how the water that is always in the air, though invisible to us, changes in those parts when it is frozen by the cold.’

    And the children would of course marvel and wonder and wish they might see snow, and the gelid wrinkling waters, and the ice that sometimes made crusts or even plates and sheets.

    And then, snow fell.

    Across light blue sunlit skies drove thick grey that came swarming down around us in a white fall, and everywhere we stood about, gazing up, gazing down, holding out our hands where the faint white flakes of the tales we told our children lay for an instant before they sank into blobs and smears of water.

    It was not a prolonged fall, but it was heavy. One instant our world was as always, green and brown, and coloured with the shine and glisten of moving water, and the easy movement of light clouds. And the next it was a white world. Everywhere, white, and the black jut of the wall rising from it, and on the top of the black, a white crest.

    Very often, looking back, we say that we did not understand clearly what was happening, the importance of an event. But I can say that this fall of white from our capacious and mild skies was something that struck into us, our minds and our understandings. Oh yes, we knew, we understood. And, looking into each other’s faces for confirmation of what we felt, it was there – the future.

    That scene is as clear in my memory as any. We were all out of our dwellings, we had run together everywhere and were in groups and little crowds, and we were gazing into more than this cold white that had so suddenly enveloped us.

    We were a tall lithe people, lightly but strongly built, and our colour was brown, and our eyes were black, and we had long straight black hair. We loved strong and vibrant colours in clothes and in the decoration of our houses: these were what we saw when we looked out at our world – the many blues of the sky, the infinite greens of the foliage, the reds and browns of our earth, mountains shining with pyrites and quartz, the dazzle of water and of sun.

    We had not thought, ever, to wonder about our congruity with our surroundings, but on that day we did. We had never seemed to ourselves anything but comely, but against the white glisten that now covered everything we seemed to ourselves dingy and shrunken. Our skins were yellow, and our eyes puckered and strained because of the cold glare we could not escape except by shutting them. The strong colours of our clothes were harsh. We stood there shivering with the suddenness of the drop in temperature, and everywhere could be seen the same involuntary movement: of people looking at each other, finding what they saw ugly, and then, as they remembered that this was how they must be striking others, their eyes turning away, while they hugged themselves in their own arms not only because of the cold, but in a way that suggested a need for comfort, consolation.

    Canopus arrived while the snow still lay, unmelted.

    There were five of them, not the usual one, or two; and this alone was enough to impress us. They were among us while the snow melted so that our world returned to its warmth and the comfortable colours of growth – and while the snow again fell, and this time stayed for longer. Nor did they leave when this second affliction of white shrank and went. It was never the way of Canopus to demand, announce, threaten – or even to stand high on the crest of our wall, as we sometimes did on civic occasions, to address large crowds. No, they moved quietly among us, staying for a while in one dwelling, and then moving on to another, and while nothing dramatic or painful was ever said, before long we had all gathered from them what was needed.

    The snow would come again, and more often; slowly the balance of warmth and cold on our planet would change, and there would be more snow and ice for us than there would be green and growth. And this and this and this was what we must do to prepare ourselves …

    We were learning how those on harsher planets matched themselves against cold. We were hearing of houses built thick and strong to withstand weights of snow and the pressures of winds we had never known. We were told of clothing, and footwear, and how to wrap a head in thick cloth so that only the eyes would be exposed – this last impressed us fearfully, for the falls of snow we had seen had not done more than make us shiver and pull our light clothes more tightly around us.

    While we were deciding how to make sure those settlements and towns nearest the poles would be protected first, we were told by Canopus that they should be abandoned altogether. All day and night, along that great black wall of ours, pressed crowds of people. We stood on it, we massed beside it. We laid our hands on the cold hard shine of it. We looked at the vast weight and thickness of it. We crowded close under it and looked up at how it towered and we felt it as a safety and guarantee. The wall – our wall – our great black useless monument, that had swallowed all our wealth and our labour and our thoughts and our capacities … it was going to save us all.

    We were all now to live on one side of it, leaving the smaller part of our globe empty, for it would soon be uninhabitable. We travelled, many of us, all over those mild and agreeable lands where the crops were still in the fields, the vegetation many-coloured and warm. We were moving there, we knew, because of our need to comprehend. For we did not. One may be told something, act on it, trust in it – but that is not the same as feeling it, as a truth. We – those of us entrusted with the task of moving the populations out of their threatened homes – were always at work, in our imaginations, on the task of really knowing that shortly ice and snow would rule here. And those who had to submit to the move were not taking it in either.

    Soon there were new towns and manufactories everywhere on the side of the wall that we believed would remain more or less as it had been … with perhaps snow and even storms, but not so very different from what we had known.

    And now, when we stood gathered on the summit of that barrier wall that was going to have to hold the pressures of massing and thrusting ice, and gazed over a still fertile landscape where the future was not visible, except in the skies that had a pallid and pinched look, we felt grief, we were struck and slowed with grief, for at last we had become enabled to feel, really feel, in our substance, in our deepest selves, that our world, our way of living, everything we had been – was done, was over. Finished.

    How dark it was, in our minds and our hopes, during that time of preparation, while we busied ourselves with resettling so many people in their new homes, while we took in what we could from Johor and the other emissaries they sent us.

    And then we waited. Massing there – for we were now overcrowded and uncomfortable – on the inhabited part of our world, we came to think in this way: that at least the wall, that always visible reminder of our situation, was a proof that we had a future. Our planet had a future.

    The time that passed then seemed long to us, and it was; but it was slowed, as well, by the events and thoughts that packed it. Our lives, from being easy, had become hard, the ideas that had inhabited our minds without being questioned were each one tested and – so far had everything changed for us – for the most part set aside.

    The crops we had grown and that we were known for in all the near planets no longer thrived. The beasts we had understood and who understood us dwindled and went, and we had new strains of animal who, because their habits were to withstand hardship and threat, did not respond to us lovingly. We had not known how much of the happiness of our lives had been because, as we went among the fields and into the wilder places, we had always been greeted by affectionate creatures. I remember how I and some other representatives of cantons and provinces went out from a town we had used as a meeting place, into a valley we were accustomed to walk in for relaxation after our discussions; and where there had been a fresh bright green, and running streams, and light, quick, playful animals, there were hillsides covered with short, rough greyish plants and rocks growing new species of lichen, grey and thick, like fur – and there was a herd of heavy-shouldered, heavy-jawed cattle, all facing us, their hours lowered, great hooves planted solidly. And, as we stood, trying not to be dismayed, because we had learned to fear our grief, the greyish-brown of their shaggy hides lightened to silvery grey. The air was shedding greyish crumbs. We put out our hands and saw them fill with this rough grey substance. A grey sky seemed to lower itself, pulled down by the weight of itself. We stood there, shivering, pulling close the new clothes Canopus had told us to use, thick and warm and not easy to move about in, and we were there a long time, despite the cold, knowing that we needed such moments of sharp revelation so that we might change inwardly, to match our outward changes.

    That part of our world beyond the wall was now grey and gelid and slow and cold, and filled with the creatures of the cold. First it was all bitter frosts, and flaking and then splitting stones, so that whole mountains changed their aspect, becoming littered and loose; and lowered and sullen skies, where clouds had become thick and dark – and then the snows came, showers and squalls of snow, and after that storms that raged a day, and then days at a time. Everything beyond our wall was white, and the new animals came crowding down towards us, their coats dragging with snow, their eyes looking sullenly out from the snow on their faces. But the snows melted, leaving the greys and the browns, and then came again – and again; and did not melt so quickly, and then did not melt at all.

    Canopus said to us that we, the Representatives, should walk around our planet on the top of the wall. About fifty of us, then, set out; and Canopus came with us. The task took us almost a year. We walked into, not with, the revolving of the planet so that the sun always rose ahead of us, and we had to turn ourselves around when we wanted to see how the shadows gathered at nightfall. Because the top of the wall for the greater part of its way was so narrow, we walked no more than two or three abreast, and those at the back of this company had it brought into us how small and few we were under skies that on our right were packed with snow clouds. On the other side of the wall, but far down towards the pole, the skies were often still blue, and sometimes even warm, and down there were the greens and browns of a summery land, and the streams were quick and lively. To our right the grey and dour landscape was obscured again and again by snow. We could see that the whiteness of cold had claimed the far mountains on our right, and was covering the foothills and spreading out down the valleys. And the winds that come pouring down from there hurt our lungs and made our eyes sting, so that we turned our heads away and looked down over the part of our world that still said to us, Welcome, here nature is as warm and as comfortable as your flesh. But Canopus kept directing us – gently, but making sure we did it – to look as much as we could into the world of cold.

    And so we went, day after day, and it was as if we walked into a spreading blight, for soon, even on the left side of the wall we saw how grasses shrank and dimmed and vegetation lost its lustre, and the skies lowered themselves with a white glare somewhere behind the blue. And on the right the snows were reaching down, down, towards us, and our familiar landscapes were hard to recognize.

    There was a day that we stood all together on our barrier wall, looking up into the freezing immensities, with Canopus among us, and we saw that the enormous heavy animals that Canopus had brought us from another of their planets were crowding close in to the wall. They massed there, in vast herds, with the snow driving down behind them, and they were lifting their great heads and wild trapped eyes at the wall, which they could not cross. A short way ahead of us was a narrow gap which we had closed with a sliding door half the wall’s height.

    Canopus did not have to tell us what we must do. Some of us went down the side of the wall on to the rough soil, where the grasses had long since gone, leaving a thin crust of lichens, and pulled back the gates. The herds lifted their heads and swung their horns and trampled their feet in indecision, and then saw that this was their deliverance – and first one beast and then another charged through the gap, and soon from all over the frozen lands came charging and thundering herds of animals, and they all, one after another, went through the gap. What heavy clumsy beasts they were! We could never become accustomed to their mass and weight and ponderousness. On their heads were horns which at their base were thicker than our thighs, and sometimes they had four and even six horns. Their hooves left behind prints that would make small ponds. Their shoulders, to support these crests and clubs of bone, were like the slopes of hills. Their eyes were red and wild and suspicious, as if their fate was to query forever what had ordained them to carry such weights of bone and horn and meat and hair, for their coats hung down around them like tents.

    These herds passed through the gap in our wall, taking twenty of our days to do it, and soon there were none of these beasts of the cold in that part of our world that was doomed to be swallowed by the cold. They were all in the more favoured parts – and we knew, without Canopus having to say anything to us, what it meant.

    Had we really imagined that our guardian wall would contain all of the snow and ice and storm on one side of it, leaving everything on the other side warm and sweet? No, we had not; but we had not, either, really taken into our understandings that the threat would strike so hard into where we now all lived … into where we were crowding, massed, jostling together, with so much less of food and pleasantness that our former selves, our previous conditions, seemed like a dream of some distant and favoured planet that we only imagined we had known.

    We stood there, looking into hills and valleys where grass still grew, though more thinly, and where the movement of water was still quick and free; we saw how the herds of animals of the cold spread everywhere, making our ears ring and hurt with their savage exulting bellowing because they had found some grass. We were a company of thin yellow light-boned birdlike creatures, engulfed in the thick pelts of the herds, wildly gazing at a landscape that no longer matched us. And, as we had taken to doing more and more, we gazed up, our eyes kept returning to the skies, where the birds moved easily. No, they were not the small and pretty birds of the warm times, flocks and groups and assemblies darting and swirling and swooping as one, moving as fast as water does when its molecules are dancing. They were the birds of this chilly time, individual, eagles and hawks and buzzards, moving slowly on wings that did not beat, but balanced. They too had heavy shoulders and their eyes glared from thick feathers, and they circled and swept about the skies on the breath of freezing winds that had killed our familiar flocks sometimes as they flew; so that, seeing the little brightly coloured bodies drop from the air, we had looked up and imagined we could see, too, the freezing blast that had struck them down out of the sky. But they were birds, these great savage creatures; they could move; they could sweep from one end of a valley to the other in the time we could hold a breath. We had once been as they were, we told ourselves, as we stood there on the wall slowed and clumsy in our thick skins – the wall which, on the side towards the ice, was dimmed and clouded, no longer a brilliant shining black, but shades of grey. Frosted grey.

    Now that the herds had all gone through the wall, we filled the gap by pushing across the gate. But Canopus said that as soon as we got back to our houses, work parties must be sent out, and this gap, and the others that had been left, must be built up as strongly and thickly as all the rest of the wall. For the openings that had been ordered to be left in the wall long before there had been cold, or even the first signs of cold, to save animals that had not even been brought to our planet, had fulfilled their purpose. We no longer needed them. The wall must be perfect and whole and without a weak place.

    We walked on for some days after that before there was a blizzard of an intensity we had not even been able to imagine. We huddled on the safe side of the wall, while the winds screamed over us and sometimes came sucking and driving down where we were, and we shivered and we shrank, and knew that we had not begun to imagine what we had, all of us, to face. And when the screaming and scouring stopped and we climbed up the little projecting steps to the top, carefully because of the glaze of ice on them, we saw that on the cold side snow had fallen so heavily that all the hollows and the heights of the landscape were filled in with billowy white, and the wall was only half its previous height.

    By then we were not far from our starting place, and we all longed to be back in our homes, our new thick-walled solid houses with roofs that had been pitched to throw off any snowfall – so we had thought. But now wondered. Were we going to have to live under snow as some creatures lived under water? Were we going to have to make little tunnels and caves for ourselves under a world of snow?

    But still, on our side of the wall, where our towns and cities and farms spread, there was some green, there was the shine of moving water. And knowing of our hunger and our desperation and our longing, Canopus did not now make us turn our faces from this livingness, but allowed us to stumble on, looking warmthwards, trying to ignore the snowy wilderness that was crowding down on us.

    And it was during these days that Johor fell back with me, and talked to me, alone. I listened to him and I had my eyes on my fellows in front, the Representatives, and when I knew that what I was being told was for me, and not for them – not yet, at least, because they could not yet face it – there came into me an even deeper sense of what was in store. But what worse could there possibly be?

    Ahead of us this great wall of ours stood high and black above marshes where the snows of the blizzard had partly melted, leaving streaks and blobs of thin white on dark water. We stood there, Johor and I, and watched our companions walk away, and become no more than a moving blur on the crest of the wall where it rose to cross a ridge and then disappeared from our view. It climbed again, and we saw it, still mighty and tall though so far away, showing exactly what its nature was, for on one side the snows piled, and on the other the beasts fed on wintry grass and on low grey bushes.

    Johor touched my arm, and we walked forward to stand where the marshes lay on either side. On the right the dark white-streaked waters seemed channels to the world of snow and ice. But on the other side the marshes were an estuary which led to the ocean. We called it that, though it was really a large lake, enclosed by land. We had been told of, and some of us had seen, planets that were more water than land – where lumps and pieces and even large areas of land were in watery immensities. It is hard to believe in something very far from experience. With us everything was the other way about. Our ‘ocean’ was always a marvel to us. Was precious. Our lives depended on it, we knew that, for it helped us to make our atmosphere. It seemed to us to represent distant and rare truths, was a symbol to us of what was hard to attain and must be guarded and sheltered. Those of you who live on planets where liquids are as common as earth and rocks and sand will find it as hard to imagine our cherishing of this ‘ocean’ of ours as we found it to visualize planets where water masses bathed the whole globe in a continuous living movement, speaking always of wholeness, oneness, interaction, of rapid and easy interchange. For the basis of our lives, the substance which bound us in continuity, was earth. Oh yes, we knew that this soil and rock that made our planet, with water held so shallowly in it, and only in one place, except for the streams and rivers that fed it, was something that moved, just as water moved – we knew rock had its currents, like water. We knew it because Canopus had taught us to think like this. Solidity, immobility, permanence – this was only how we with our Planet 8 eyes had to see things. Nowhere, said Canopus, was permanence, was immutability – not anywhere in the galaxy, or the universe. There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow. And at a hillside. Or a mountain.

    I was standing there with my back to the icy winds, face towards our precious lake that was out of sight beyond tall plumy reeds, and I was thinking: And ice? – we must see this new enemy of ours as something all fluidity and movement? And it was at that moment that it came into me for the first time that our ocean might freeze. Even though it was on the ‘safe’ side of our barrier wall. The thought came like a blast of cold. I knew it would be so, and I already felt something of what Canopus was going to tell me. I did not want to turn and face Johor – face what I had to.

    I felt his touch on my elbow again and I did turn.

    I saw him as he saw me, fragile and vulnerable inside thick pelts, hands hidden inside sleeves, eyes peering out from deep shaggy hoods.

    It is a hard thing, to lose the sense of physical appropriateness – and again my eyes went skywards where an eagle lay poised on air just above us.

    ‘Representative,’ said Johor gently, and I made my gaze return downwards, to what I could see of his yellow face.

    ‘Your ocean will freeze,’ he said.

    I could feel my bones huddle and tremble inside my thin flesh.

    I tried to joke: ‘Canopus can bring us new beasts with heavy bones for the cold – but what can you do for our bones? Or shall we all die out as our other animals did, to make way for new species – new races?’

    ‘You will not die out,’ he said, and his strong brown eyes – inflamed though, and strained – were forcing me to look at him.

    Another new thought came into me, and I asked: ‘You were not born on Canopus, so you said. What kind of planet did you come from?’

    ‘I was given existence on a warm and easy planet.’

    ‘As Planet 8 was, once.’

    ‘As the planet is that you will all be going to.’

    At this I was silent for a very long time. There were too many adjustments to make in my thoughts – which whirled about and did not settle into patterns that could frame useful questions.

    When I was slightly recovered, I still was facing Johor, who stood with his back to a wind that came pouring down from the snow fields.

    ‘You are always travelling,’ I said. ‘You are seldom on your own planet – do you miss it?’

    He did not answer. He was waiting.

    ‘If we are all to be space-lifted away from our home, then why the wall? Why were we not taken away when the snows first began to fall?’

    ‘The hardest thing for any one of us to realize – every one of us, no matter how high in the levels of functioning – is that we are all subject to an overall plan. A general Necessity.’

    ‘It was not convenient?’ And my voice was bitter.

    ‘When we took you for training to the other planets, did you ever hear of the planet Rohanda?’

    I had, and my curiosity was already expectation – and even a warm and friendly expectation.

    ‘Yes, it is a beautiful planet. And quite one of our most successful attempts …’ He smiled, though I could not see his smile, only the change in the shape of his eyes, for his mouth was covered: and I smiled too – ruefully, of course. For it is not easy to accept oneself as an item among many.

    ‘Our poor planet is not a successful attempt!’

    ‘It is not anyone’s fault,’ he said. ‘The Alignments have changed … unexpectedly. We believed that Planet 8 was destined for stability and slow growth. As things have not turned out that way, we mean to take you to Rohanda. But first another phase of development there must be concluded. It is a question of raising a certain species there to a level where, when your kind are brought in, you will make a harmonious whole. That is not yet. Meanwhile you, on this planet, must be sheltered from the worst of what will happen.’

    ‘The wall, then, is something to hold off the worst of the snow?’

    ‘The worst of the ice that will come pressing down in great sheets and plates and will rise against the wall. Down there, where we look now …’ and he turned me about to face away from the cold towards the warm pole, ‘it will be bad enough. You may have a hard time of it, surviving. And this wall will hold, so we believe, the force of the ice. For long enough.’

    ‘And you do not want us all to know that we must leave our Home Planet for Rohanda?’

    ‘It is enough that one of you knows.’

    It took time to digest this. Time and observation. For without my ever telling anyone at all, not even the other Representatives, it became known that we would all be space-lifted to another beautiful warm planet, where our lives would become again as they had once been – in a past that seemed so far from us. Though it was not far, only on the other side of the physical change in our lives that had been so sharp and sudden that we could hardly believe what we had been.

    Johor and the other Canopeans left us, having made sure that all the gaps in our wall were well and strongly filled. And that no living thing was left on the cold side of the wall. It seemed a dead place, where now the blizzards raged almost continuously, the winds howled and shrieked, and the snows heaped themselves up and up so that even the mountains seemed likely to become buried. And then, standing on our wall to gaze there, our gloved hands held to shield our streaming eyes, we saw that the mountains had a glassy look, and that between the foothills crept tongues of ice. A few of us did wrap ourselves, and made little carts that could slide on runners, and we ventured up into that frigid and horrible land to find out what we could. It was like a journey into another part of ourselves, so slowed and difficult were our movements, so painful the breaths we had to take. All we could see was that the snows piled up, up, into the skies, and the packs of ice crept down. And, this expedition over, we stood huddled on our wall, looking at where we had been, and saw how the snow came smoking off fields of white and eddied up into skies that were a hard cold blue.

    We had a great deal to do, all of us, and most particularly we Representatives. The physical problems, bad enough, were the least of it. Now that it had spread from mind to mind that we had a home waiting for us, in a favoured part of the galaxy, where we could again be congruous with our surroundings, a quick-moving, shining-brown-skinned, healthy race under blue skies – now that this dream had taken hold of us, our present realities seemed to numb us even more. And when we looked up and saw how the snows had massed themselves into packs of gleaming ice with great cracks that could run from one horizon to another – this present horror came to seem less real to us than Rohanda, where we were bound. When? We were coming to yearn, to long, for our deliverance, and against this I and the others had to fight. For if we allowed ourselves to lapse into daydreams and longings, then none of us would be alive to make that final journey to the lovely planet.

    One of our difficulties was that when our peoples had been moved away from the cold, everything that had been built to shelter them and their beasts faced away from the blizzards. Standing on the wall, what had to strike us first was how villages and towns huddled and crept and hid away, and there seemed no windows or openings, for these were on the other side. Before, our towns had been spread about and seemed haphazard, as towns do, when built to catch the advantages of an amenable slope, or of a fertile wind. Now, as we looked down, a town might seem like a single building, in which one might walk from room to room through a valley. So vulnerable they looked, our new homes, so easily crushed, as we stood high there, feeling the winds tear and buffet us, knowing the strength of what was to come – and yet, down again at earth level, inside a town, it was easy to forget what threatened. It was sheltered, for the winds streamed above. All the apertures showed hills still green, and mountains green for a good part of the way up to their summits, and there was the glint and shine of water, and patches of misty blue appeared among the thick grey of the cloud. Down there was fertility and warmth and pleasantness … At the margins of the eye’s reach was our heart’s desire.

    What were we to do, then, we Representatives? Force these people for whom we were responsible to look back – look up? There behind them was the rampart of the wall, so high from these low huddles they lived in that a third of the sky was blocked out. A wall like a cliff, a sheer black shining cliff. Still black on this side, though if you stood close to it and gazed into the shine that had once mirrored blue skies where the white clouds of what now seemed an interminable summer ambled and lazed, it could be seen that the smooth black had a faint grey bloom. Could be seen that the minutest scratchiest lines marred the shine. Frost. And in the early mornings the whole glossy surface had a crumbling grey look to it.

    Were we to insist that every individual in the land climb up the steps to the top of the wall and look icewards, feel the threat of the gale, know what lay there always on the other side of the wall? We were to make a ritual of it, perhaps?

    Often enough we, the fifty or so of us, would climb up there to look out and up to the cold pole for new changes and threats – and debate how to combat this weakening mood among the people.

    Perhaps it was the extent of the changes that prevented us. A world of snow – was how we had thought of it. But it was ice now. The snow

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1