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

our journey. It will be remembered that I said there was the very slightest inclination of our planet on its axis, which had never been enough to make much difference in our good times; but now we wondered if perhaps, because we were in such extremities of climate, this small slant might make enough of a change to call it a summer, when the other pole in its turn reached forward closer to the sun. Well, it turned out that it was so: there was the briefest season of weather when a slight increase in warmth made it possible to bring on crops and cosset a few vegetables. But it could not be summer enough to change our situation.
    Here at the top of the planet, with nothing around us but glazed ice on which we could hardly keep our footing, we had to acknowledge that we had not found anything that could be of use as foodstock, except perhaps the white snow creatures. Which did not live up here, in these latitudes – here nothing lived. And our small livingness, our slow and cold-confused thoughts seemed to us out of place, almost an affront to nature which had ordained only the silences of the ice, the shrieking of the storms.
    On the way back, the girl fell ill and we had to pull her along on one of the carts – there was room for her, now we had eaten nearly all our dried meat. When we reached the valleys, where the small movement of the snow animals showed on the snows among the shadows of the great birds that swung their white wings overhead, we caught several. This was easy, for they did not know enough to fear us. They were confiding little beasts, and snuggled up to the girl who lay half-conscious on her bed, and their sweetness and warmth revived her, and she wept for the first time, because of the death of her friend Nonni.
    Of the journey back there is no need to say any more than it was frightful, and every dragging and painful step told us how foolish we had been to match ourselves against dangers we had not been equipped to measure. When at last we reached where we expected to see our black wall, we did not see it. It was a blindingly brilliant glittering morning, after a night of snow that fell so heavily we thought we might be suffocated by it. Stumbling on, our eyes half-closed against the glare, we nearly stepped straight over a cliff – our wall; we had walked up to it at the level of its top, for ice and snow had filled in everything. Standing there and looking down, we could see that snow had been blown down from the cold side into drifts along the foot of the wall. Not deep drifts but enough to cover the earth to a good distance.
    We climbed carefully down the slippery dangerous steps into safety. Alsi soon recovered, and she took the little beasts that had shared her cart with her to the Animal Makers, and at last, after much experimentation, it was found they would eat lichens and the low bushes of the tundras. But what had they lived on when they were in that wilderness of frozen water? It was at last decided that in the caves there must have been supplies of straw or leaves, or perhaps even some sort of vegetation growing. We bred these creatures for food; but our problem was, after all, that we were not able to grow enough to feed animals. The great herds, which had seemed able to thrive on such sparse and dry vegetation, were now roaming restlessly from valley to hillside and even up the mountains in search of food. If the cold was going to creep down past our barrier wall, then we must expect our grasses and shrubs to dwindle – and the herds to dwindle too.
    It was this pressure on us that made our more tender-minded Representatives agree to think again about our lake. Our ocean. A ceremony was made of it. All the populations of the valleys round about, and delegations from every part of our planet, stood along the edges of our ocean. It was a sombre, grey morning, and the crowds were silent and grey. From where we stood on the low hills on one side of the stretch of water, we could see