The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Doris Lessing

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.

      But the change had begun some time back: when Nonni died in the cold, we did not suffer very much. We were too cold and too threatened ourselves. Alsi mourned for him, but not as she might have done once. No, death had a new quality, and one that made us ashamed. We could not care as once we had … that was the truth of it. Was it that the cold was chilling our hearts, slowing our blood, making us less loving and responsive to each other? A child died, and we all knew we might be thinking secretly: So much the better; what horrors is it going to be spared, this unfortunate one! Almost certainly more fortunate than we the survivors! And we knew we were thinking: One less mouth to feed. And: It would be better if children were not born at all, not in this terrible time. And, as I have already suggested, when a species begins to think like this about its most precious, its original, capacity, that of giving birth, of passing on an inheritance, then it is afflicted indeed. If we are not channels for the future, and if this future is not to be better than we are, better than the present, then what are we?

      We knew what we had been: and, as the news came in of riots in another valley, food riots, or perhaps even for no apparent cause, then we looked up into our dreary skies and thought: Canopus, when are you coming, when will you fulfil your promise to us?

      then Canopus came, but not as we had expected. A great fleet of her spaceships floated in by way of the warm pole, and landed on our tundras; and what seemed an army of Canopeans unloaded supplies from the ships. We did not at first know what they all were, for we were rejoicing over foodstuffs we had not seen for so long – all kinds of dried and preserved fruits and vegetables. But mostly there were mountains of containers with some sort of pliable substance, and the Canopeans said they were for insulating our dwellings.

      Were they not bearers of some other message? Nothing from Johor, for instance? Were we not to be given a time for our being finally rescued?

      No, nothing of that kind – the space-fleet had been ordered to bring in these materials, and this is what had been done. And with that, the craft lifted up again into the skies and vanished.

      The material for covering our houses was new to us. It was very thick soft easily manipulated stuff, and what we had to do was to make of it shells and hoods and coats for our dwellings. So light was this material that it was easy for a few people to cut, to fit together, and then to lift these shells over the buildings. We debated whether to cut windows in each carapace, but decided not to. For ventilation we had to rely on the opening and shutting of doors. Inside our homes now we crowded in a dark which was lit dimly by electricity that we supplemented when we could by lichen moulds soaked in tallow. Our world was now dark, dark, and always darker as the skies overhead became thicker and greyer. We woke in the stuffy dark that was warmed a little because of the press of bodies, and lit our little glimmers of light, or allowed ourselves the weakest trickle of electricity; and we went out into a world that showed a trace of brightness and light only far down towards the pole, where sometimes there was a little blue. From over the grey wall came driving the snow-laden winds. Now snow flurries played and smoked around the foot of our side of the wall, and tempests were common. And each bout of screaming winds seemed to drive us deeper down against the earth. Not all our buildings had been covered over with the insulating material. In some of our towns were buildings of as many as five or even six layers of function (I am aware of course that this will seem unimpressive to those of you who live on planets where buildings may be as tall as cliffs and mountains. I have seen such buildings myself.) These were too tall for us to be able to cover them over. Some hardy persons had elected to remain in them, but every storm emptied layer after layer, leaving perhaps a few people on the ground layer or on the one above that. And those who had been driven out of their high unprotected dwellings and working places massed together lower down, then were driven by force of numbers into joining families or groups or clans who perhaps had slightly more room than others. Thus adding to the overcrowding … to the tensions … to the always worsening moods and tempers of everybody. Rapidly worsening: having to put the heavy coverings over our living places had seemed to bring us all to a sudden new pitch of explosiveness. From everywhere came the news of the evidences of it.

      ‘There has been fighting on the other side of the planet.’

      ‘Fighting? Has someone been killed?’

      ‘Many. Very many.’

      ‘Many people have been killed? Why, did so many quarrels break out all at the same time?’

      ‘You see, groups of people have been fighting.’

      ‘Fighting against each other? Groups?’

      ‘Yes, groups, the people of one village fought another.’

      ‘But what for?’

      ‘Each village accused the other of the same bad behaviour.’

      ‘I don’t understand!’

      Yes, that is how the news of our first battles was received by us. And this incomprehension persisted.

      ‘They are fighting between the mountains over there.’

      ‘Fighting? Who? What for? Have we been invaded, then? Have enemies come from the skies?’

      ‘No, no, the people in the land just past those foothills, you remember, where our young people used to journey to look for wives and husbands.’

      ‘How