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

a greyish brown huddling of people around the far shores. We Representatives were on the shore nearest the wall, and we could see, far over the mountains on the other side of the water, a light greyish blue sky that seemed still to smile. Populations under threat know silences that they understand nothing of in lighthearted times. The people around me could be observed turning their faces about, to look into other faces; all were silent, or speaking only in very low voices, and it came into my mind that the reason for this deep attentiveness was because they were, we all were,
listening.
Everything we had to do was difficult and hateful to us, we were not at ease with even the smallest and most ordinary and often-repeated things in our daily lives, from the putting on of the heavy coats to the preparing of the fatty meat which was our staple food; not at ease in our sleep that was always threatened by cold creeping in from somewhere, a heavy weight of cold that seemed to subside into us, like water soaking clay; not at ease even in the stretching out of a hand or a smile, for our bodies and faces seemed always too light and friable for what they had to do and had to express. There seemed to be nothing left to us that was instinctive and therefore joyful, or ordinarily pleasurable. We were foreign to ourselves as much as to our surroundings. And therefore groups, and crowds, sank easily and often into silences. As if this sense, hearing, was being pressed into service in default of other senses which we needed and lacked. We
listened
– the eyes of every one of us had in them always a look of waiting to hear or receive some news, or message or information.
    There had been some of us Representatives who had said that we ought to make of this occasion, the dedicating of our lake to usefulness and productivity, a ceremony of songs and chants, contrasting the bleakness of our present time with the past. The so recent past… it was only the young children there who did not remember our lake set blue and bright among the greens and yellows of foliage. What need of a formal ritual of memory? Our stretch of shining waters had been blue, and had been green, and there had been little white wavelets on it. Brown rocks had made diving places all around the amazingly and improbably coloured shores … living always in dun and grey and dirt colour, the hues of a warmed and fruitful land come to seem extraordinary, almost impossible. Had we stood here, we people of our stricken planet – stood here and looked at lively brown bodies diving and swimming in sky-reflecting waters? We had danced and sung around these shores on warm nights when these soft dark waters had seemed crammed with stars? We
had
? Well, we knew we had, and we told our younger children about it all … and their eyes, puzzling at our faces, said they believed it all as they believed the legends we had been given by Canopus to repeat to them. For Canopus had told us Representatives a thousand tales that would prepare the minds of our people for understanding our role as a planet among planets, and how we were cherished and fed and watched over by Canopus. I myself remember how, as a small child, I was taken out on to a hillside by the Representatives of the time, with other children, on a soft warm night, and shown how a certain brilliant star, low on the horizon, was Canopus, our fostering and nurturing star. I remember how I fought with my own mind to take it all in, how I matched the rustling of the grasses around me, the familiar warmth of my parents’ hands, and the pleasant smell of their flesh, with the thought: that shining thing up there, that little shine, is a world, like ours, like our planet here, and I must remember when I look at that star that it is a world, and my Maker.
    I remember how I part-understood, partially accepted. And how the legends and tales sank into my mind and fed it, and made in me a place that I could enter at will, to