It was bitter to me, to let go that little place I was able to rest on, take refuge in – the thought, This is me, I, Doeg – and I resisted.
I said: ‘Not long ago I was a quick-moving, slender, brown-skinned creature, who woke in the morning thinking: Soon I will step out into a sun that will polish my brown skin into little gleams of colour, and the air will flow in and out of my lungs in balmy mildness … that was I, then, that was Doeg. And now I am a thick heavy greasy creature with dull greyish brown skin. But I am still Doeg, Johor – that feeling has stayed – and so, now, you say I must let that go too. Very well, I am not the elegant handsome animal I was, and I am not this lump of uncouthness. But I still come up out of sleep and feel: Here I am. I recognise myself. It is I who lie here, after so many journeys and adventures in my sleep.’
‘Your shared sleep.’
‘My shared waking – very well then, Johor, what am I to hold on to in this – blizzard that is blowing away everything, everything, everything …’
‘Do you remember how we, Canopus, came to you all and gave you instruction in what made you, made your world?’
‘Yes, it was not long before you came to us and told us to build – the wall that would shield us from the ice.’
‘Which has, and does shield you from the ice.’
‘Which would have done better to give way long ago, putting an end to this long dreariness and torment.’
‘No.’
‘Because there is something left to be done? What? You have come all the way here from your place in the galaxy, and you have sent away your Traveller, and you sit here with me in this shed, and …’
‘Well, Representative?’
‘What do I represent, Johor?’
‘Do you remember what we taught you?’
I sat up in my nest, and pulled up the thick coverings all around me and over my head, so that only my face was bare. Close to me, Johor’s face showed under his hood.
‘I remember how we first understood that you were teaching us something in a way none of us had done before – directly. You asked us all to go up into the hills on the other side of the wall, and to choose a place where the ground rose all around. We massed there, all of us from the town and from a long way about. You asked us to bring one of the animals – those that are extinct now – that we intended to kill for food. You asked us to have it killed before the people assembled, and we, the Representatives, were pleased that the act of killing was not to be associated with your presence, for while we did not conceal what lay behind our eating of meat, we tried to see that there was no reason to dwell on it all – the slaughterhouses, the preparations. For when we came together to discuss this particular thing, we Representatives, we always found for some reason a reluctance in us, a fear, to do with this business of killing other animals: It has always seemed to us that here was an area of danger. Something that could take hold and spread – and yet we did not remember Canopus ever saying anything about it.’
‘One of four species that were used to make you was easily roused to killing. Some of us on Canopus did not wish to make use of that material, but others did, for this was – and still is – a physically strong species, enduring, able to bear hardship.’
‘When we all stood there on those hillsides looking down at that dead antelope, and my old friend Marl took up the knife to cut it open, I felt thrills of sensation all through me – and I was afraid to call this pleasure, but I knew that it was. And when the stomach was split from throat to tail, and the guts fell out, I knew how easy it would be to plunge my hands into that mass and then …’ A red mist blew across my mind, and when it had gone, the frosty twigs of the roof, the grey rocks, the pinched face of Johor looked even more meagre and ugly.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you did well to be careful.’
‘Yet you called us there, to watch the body of that animal cut up. We stood under a warm sun, and the wind brought us the spicy scents from the lake, and we saw the guts laid in a heap there, with the heart and the liver and the other organs, the head and the tail and the hide together, and the bones laid bare like the branches of a tree. And we were restless and moved about on our hillsides, and we sniffed at the scent of blood which seemed to belong to our memories, and then you came out from among us and stood surrounded by those bloody bits of meat and bone. And you said to us, “You are wondering, every one of you, where the beast has gone – where what is real of the beast, as you know it. Where its charm, its friendliness, its grace, its way of moving that delights you. All of you know that what is lying here is not what is true about this dead beast. When we look around at the hillsides, where the wind is rippling the grasses and whitening the bushes, we see there the same spirit that was the truth of this dead animal – we see a quickness and freshness and delight. And when we look up now at the play of the clouds – there is the reality of the beast. And when we look around at each other and see how beautiful we are, again we see the beast, the pleasantness and rightness of it …” And so you spoke, Johor, for a long time, before you stopped talking of beauty and grace. Then you bent over the piles of meat and bones, and you held up in your bare hands the heart, and you said to us that each one of us is a package of hearts, livers, kidneys, entrails, bones, and each one of these is a whole and knows itself. A heart knows it is a heart and feels itself to be that. And so with a liver and every other thing inside every animal, inside you. You are a parcel, a package of smaller items, wholes, entities, each one feeling its identity, saying to itself, Here I am! – just as you do, in moments of sensing what you are. But this assembly of heart, lungs, skin, blood, packaged so tight and neat inside a skin, is a whole, is a creature … And you made us laugh, Johor, standing there on that lovely morning, which I remember as colour, colour – blues and greens and soft reds and yellows – saying that a liver probably believed it was the best and highest organ in a body, and a heart too, and the blood too, and perhaps they even believe that a body is made up entirely of heart, or liver or blood … Yes, I remember how we all laughed. And that was how that lesson ended. And when Canopus came again to visit us, you brought with you the instruments for seeing the very small, and for a long time, every one of us, down to the smallest child, studied the very small through these instruments.’
‘And what did you remember of that occasion, what stayed with you most strongly? Was it the unlikeable sight of the bloody organs spilled out on the ground, and your pity for the beast?’
‘No, it was how you taught us to look for the charm and quickness of the animal everywhere – in the movement of water, or the patterns flocks of birds used to make as they swirled and darted and flowed about the sky.’
Alsi came sliding quickly into the shed, opening the door as little as she could. She was heavy and clumsy in her carapace of skins. She smiled at the two of us, though, and went about her work of pushing the heathers and lichens and bark through the openings into the pens of the snow animals. It took a long time, and I was remembering how quick she had once been. When she had finished she stood in front of us and opened the front of her coat, and we saw there the little confiding face of one of her pets, with its bright blue eyes, and she stroked it, in a way that said how she needed this contact with aliveness, with trust, and she said: ‘The Representatives for the Lake say that there are few creatures left in it.’
‘Do not worry,’ I said, as Johor did not speak. ‘We shall not be needing much more food.’
She nodded, for she was already beginning to understand what was happening. She said: ‘News comes in from many towns and villages now that the people have decided not to eat, but to let themselves die.’
Johor said: ‘Please collect together as many of you as have the will for it, and go to these places and say to them, Canopus asks you to stay alive for as long as you can. Say it is necessary.’
‘It is necessary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Although we shall all die very soon?’
This was only the breath of a reproach, and she found it hard to look at him. But she did, and there was such a bewilderment there he felt it strike him – I could see how he shifted his limbs about inside the skins, as if he were adjusting himself to take on a physical burden. She was such an honest direct creature, so strong, so fine – and she had not let herself go at all into the general lassitude and indifference.
‘There is more than one way of dying,’ he said gently.
He looked straight into her eyes. She looked back. It was a moment when invisible doors seemed to want to open, want to let in truths, new knowledge … I could feel in myself these pressures. I was watching her eyes, so bravely searching Johor’s. Meanwhile she stroked and stroked the head of her little friend, who looked up at her with such trust.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I will see that the message gets to them all.’
And Johor nodded, in a way that said: Yes, I can count on you, and she slid out again, letting in the roar of the storm outside, and a flurry of white flakes that did not melt, but lay in a patch on the stone of the floor near the door.
I said to Johor: ‘It is easier to bear the news of the death of a million people than to think that Alsi will die of starvation inside a heap of stinking furs. And I hate that in me, Johor. I have never been able to accept that partiality in us.’
‘You are complaining that we constructed you inadequately,’ he remarked, not without humour.
‘Yes, I suppose I am. I cannot help it. I have never been able to see someone weep and agonize because of the death of someone close, yet respond not at all to some general ill or danger, without feeling I am in the presence of some terrible lack, some deep failure.’
‘You forget that we did not expect for you such ordeals.’
‘Ah, Canopus, you do indeed expect a lot of us poor creatures, who are simply not up to what is needed.’
‘And yet when Alsi stood there just now, and took on so well and so bravely what I asked her, it seemed to me that as a species you are proving to be very capable of what is needed.’
‘Again, one person, one individual is made to represent so many!’
And, as I spoke, I felt now familiar pressures, the announcement deep in myself of something I should be understanding.
And that was when I let myself go away into sleep, having taken in what I could for that time. And when I woke Johor was sitting patiently, waiting for me to resume. I had not done much more than register: Here I am! – and add to it the thought: But the ‘I’ of me is not my own, cannot be, must be a general and shared consciousness – when Johor said: ‘Doeg, tell me what you all learned during that long time when you studied the material of your planet through the new instruments.’
It was very quiet. The raging of the wind had stopped. I imagined how outside the snow would be lying in billows of fresh white. Through the snow Alsi would be pushing her way, waist high, accompanied by those she had been able to rouse, and others would be trudging to the near towns and villages wondering if they would get there before the storm came again and crowded the air with white, white, white …
‘We learned that everything is made up of smaller things. And these of the smaller and finer … these organs of ours, a heart or a liver, which we don’t think of at all, but know are there, doing their work, are composed of all sorts of parts, of every kind of shape– strings and lumps and strips and layers and sponges. And these bits and pieces are made up of cells of all kinds. And these – every one of which has an energetic and satisfactory life of its own, and a death too, for you can observe these deaths, like ours – are composed of clusters of smaller living units, and molecules, and then these are made up again of just so many units, and these, too …’
My eyes, which had in fancy been dissecting a lump of flesh, a heart, seeing it dissolve into a seethe of tiny life, now again perceived Johor, a mound of skins, from which a pallid face showed. But even so, it was unmistakably Johor who sat there, a presence, a strength – a solidity.
‘Johor,’ I said, ‘I sit here feeling myself solid, a weight of matter, dense, with a shape I know every slope and surface of, and my mind is telling me that this is nothing – for I know that through what we have seen with your devices.’
‘What then was there when you came to the minutest item that we can see?’
‘There is a core – of something. Yet that dissolves and dissolves again. And around it some sort of dance of – pulsations? But the spaces between this – core, and the oscillations are so vast, so vast … that I know this solidity I feel is nothing. A shape of mist, I am, a smear of tinted light, as when we see – or saw, for we see only snow now, filling the spaces of sunlight – a spread of light with motes floating there. I am, from a perspective of vision very far from my own proper eyes, not dense or solid at all … But Johor, while I can see what it is you have been leading me to say to you, that this heaviness … for I am so heavy, so heavy, so thick and so heavy I can hardly bear it – this heaviness is nothing at all. A shape of light that has in it particles slightly denser in some places than in others. But what my mind knows is of no use to my lumpishness, Johor. What you see of me, with those eyes of yours that belong to another planet, a differently weighted star – I can imagine, for I have seen cells and molecules disappear into a kind of dance, but …’
‘A dance that you modify by how you observe it. Or think of it,’ he remarked.
The silence that is a listening deepened around us. But the claims of my discomfort and my impatience made me break it. ‘And yet this nothingness, this weight and labour of matter that lies so painfully on us all, is what you work with, Johor, for you sit here, you sit in this freezing place, and what you say is, Don’t let yourselves die yet, make the effort to keep alive – and what you are wanting to keep alive are these bodies, the flesh that disappears when you look at it with different eyes, into a something like motes with the sun on them.’
