Read Online The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online Page A

frosty crumble that we could rub loose under our fingers. But that was only the surface – so we hoped. One of us did slip and fall, almost from the top, but the drifts now were deep, and there was no harm done. The steps opened into a small space between tongues of ice that thrust forward on either side of us, and there we clustered and clung together, for it was hard to stand. And a bitter wind whined around us, spinning small crumbs of white so that all the air was thickened, and we could not see to the horizon. Below us our little town that had once shone whitely among green parks and avenues was now hard to map, for the grey sheltering hoods merged with the tundra so that we were looking down at an agglomeration of humps and protuberances that seemed as if the earth had grown them. Some of the taller buildings stood up sharp and dark, but the upper parts had collapsed in the blizzards, and had a splintered appearance. There were only small movements in the streets; few of the people went out of their dwellings now unless they had to. They had become a passive huddling population, sullen with inactivity, sullenly patient. They were waiting.
    They waited for the moment when we would all be swept up and away from our dour frigid land to the paradise of Rohanda. Crouching inside low, dark, ill-smelling buildings, where all effort had become slowed and difficult with the cold, they waited. And, standing high there on that ice cliff above them, we peered through the dim skies and searched for Canopus, for the wonderful spaceships of our Saviour and Maker Canopus.
    Where was Canopus
? Why did they delay so, and make us wait and suffer and wonder, and doubt our survival? Make us disbelieve in ourselves and in them? What was the reason for it? Yes, they had warned us, and made us prepare ourselves, and they had prescribed our barrier wall, and they had taught us how to change our habits – it seemed sometimes as if this was a change to our very beings, our inner selves – and they had flown in this amazing substance that could clothe towns as if they were people. But we were
not
saved, not being rescued; and everywhere our peoples degenerated and became thieves and sometimes murderers, and there seemed no end to it all.
    We voiced what we were thinking, that shivering morning, up on the ice cliff, we Representatives … fifty of us there were, and every activity or duty or work that we did (that was left to us now) was delineated there, by us. And as we stood there, looking into faces that were only just visible behind deep edges of shaggy fur, we could see the manifold purposes and uses of the old time, where now was –over and over again – Representative for Housing and Sheltering, Representative for Food, Representative for Conserving Warmth. And variations on these basic needs.
    For we were keeping, and in a conscious effort, our knowledge of our own possibilities, our potential for the future, which had been so amply demonstrated in the past. We were
not
merely these shivering animals, concerned only with how to keep ourselves warm, keep ourselves fed – not just what we could see as we huddled there, trying to keep our footing as the wind tugged and shoved at us. No, we were still what we had been, and would be again … and where was Canopus, who would restore us to ourselves?
    Again we made the journey around our planet, this time at the foot of the wall or cliff, not on it, as this was no longer possible because of its load of pressing ice. We stumbled through snowdrifts or over frozen earth, and our eyes were turned always to the right, for we kept the sun in front of us as much as we could – our poor weakened pallid sun which seemed now almost to be absorbing heat from us, rather than warming and nurturing us. Our eyes were at work at every moment on the surface of the wall, or cliff, for we feared very much that it would give way altogether. But so far, while every little part of