The making of representative for Planet 8 ciaa-4

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  I said to him: 'Very well, I understand, it is not yet time - though I don't know for what it isn't yet time.'

  We two were still standing quietly to one side, watching. We were not far from the shed behind the runs of the snow animals. We went there over the rutted and stained snow, past piles of the ice blocks that had the flowers and leaves of the summer plants, green and blue, frozen into them. The interior of the shed was crammed. Alsi had heaped it with sacks of the dried plant.

  The floor of the shed was now iced over, and it was ice and not frost that gleamed from the low dried-plant ceiling. We sank into the sweet-smelling sacks, and pulled our coats close. A small white animal came running out from behind sack piles: Alsi had freed her pets into the shed, and they were living there, happily, and had bred, for some fluffy little beasts came out, looked at us, and chose the sacks we sat on as a playground. They had such confidence and such pleasure in everything, such charm - and what came welling up out of me was the cry: 'And they will soon all be gone, all gone, and yet another species will have vanished from life and the living...' And I began on another cycle of pleas and of plaints, of grief - of sorrowing rebellion. 'And what your answer will be I know, for there is no other; you will say, Johor, that this charm, this delightfulness, will vanish here and reappear elsewhere - on some place or planet that we have never heard of and that perhaps you have not heard of either! Charm is not lost, you say, the delicious friendliness that is the ground of these little animals' nature cannot be lost, for these are qualities that life must re-create - the vehicles that contain them, here, now, for us - yes, they will be gone soon, the little creatures will be dead, all of them, all - but we are not to mourn them, no, for their qualities will be reborn -somewhere. It does not matter that they are going, the individual does not matter, the species does not matter - Alsi does not matter, and nor does Doeg, nor Klin and Masson, nor Marl and Pedug and the rest, for when we are extinguished, then...' And as I reached this place in my chant, or dirge, I hesitated and my tongue stopped, hearing what I had said. I understood, yet did not, could not, yet.

  I said, in the same thick, mechanical, even dead voice that I had heard used by the others outside, as they questioned Johor: 'Yet we, the Representatives, we will be saved, so you say, I have been hearing you say - is that not what you said... yes, what else have you been saying... no, no, you have not said it, but then I haven't said anything like that either... yet if that is not what you have been meaning, intending me to hear...' I stopped my thick stupid mumbling and sat very quiet for a long time, a long long time. The little creatures tired of their tumbling play and lay close by me and Johor on the sacks, snuggling into the thick pelts. The two parents and four little ones, all licking our hands, sending out trills and murmurs of greeting, as to friends - their human friends. Soft blue eyes blinked at us, blinked more slowly, shut, opened showing the blue, then went out, as they slumbered there, curled into small white mounds.

  I came out of the time of deep inward pondering which I was not able to monitor or direct, for it had its own laws and necessities, and I said: 'I remember how the thought came into me that I, Doeg, was in the shape I am, with the features I have, because of a choice among multitudes. I set in front of myself a mirror, and I looked at my features - nose from my mother, eyes from my father, shape of head from one, set of body from the othei, with memories of grandparents and great-grandparents. I looked, saying: her hands came down to him, and then to her and so to me, and his hair shows on that head and grew again on my grandmother, and so me - and I thought how that couple, my parents, could have given birth to - how many? - children, thousands, perhaps millions, every one slightly different - it was the slight difference that intrigued me in this private game of mine, and I imagined as I stood there looking at my face, my body, how stretching behind me, to each side of me, in every direction away from me, stood slight modifications of me, some very similar indeed, some hardly at all. I filled a town with these variations of myself, then a city, then, in my mind, whole landscapes. Doeg, Doeg, Doeg again, and mentally I greeted these nonexistent never-to-exist people, people who had not come into life because I had come in this precise shape of body and face, with this particular set of mannerisms - I said to these people, all of whom resembled me more or less, closely or only slightly, being the same height, or a little taller or a little shorter, with variations of the same hair, eyes in an allotment of possibilities - I said to them: Look, here you are, in me... for the feeling of me, of I, that feeling I am here, Doeg, would have been your feeling had the chances of the genes fallen differently, and if you, your particular shape and mould, had been born instead of me. What was born, then, to those repositories of a million years of the dicing of the genes, was a feeling, a consciousness, was the self-awareness: here I am. And this awareness was later given the name Doeg - though I have used many names in my life. That particular feeling was born into this shape and style and set of inherited attributes, and could have been born into any one of that multitude of others, the possibilities who, in my mind's eye, stand, and stood, like ghosts, smiling perhaps a little wryly, watching me who chanced to succeed. But they are me and I am them, for it was the feeling of me that was born...' And I lapsed out, went away then, for a time, and came back with: '... And yet you say, Johor, and of course as soon as you say it, it is true, it must be true, that this precious thing, what I hold on to when I say: I am here, Doeg, this is the feeling I am, and have, and what I recognize in sleep, and will recognize as myself when I die, leaving all this behind, this precious little thing, so little, for awaking in a thick dark night out of a sleep so deep it takes a long time to know where and who you are, all there is of you, of your memories, of your life, of your loves, of your family and children and your friends - all that there is this little feeling, here I am, the feeling of me - and yet it is not mine at all, but is shared, it must be, for how can it be possible that there are as many shades and degrees of me-ness as there are individuals on this planet of ours? No, it must be that though I do not know it, this consciousness, here I am, this is I, this is me, this sensation that I cannot communicate to anyone, just as none of us may communicate to anyone else at all the atmosphere of a dream, no matter how familiar the dream, and how close it is to you, or how often it comes during a long life - this sensation, or taste, or touch, or recognition, or memory - this me-ness - is nevertheless known very well to others. But they may not know who else shares this particular taste or feel - this class or grade or kind of quality of consciousness. Meeting me, they do not know that I share what they are, their feeling of themselves; and I, meeting them, being with them, cannot know that we are the same. Nor can we know how many we are, or how few - nor how many grades or types or kinds of these states of consciousness there are. This planet of ours: are there a million different me's here? Half a million? Ten? Five? Or do we all share the same quality of self-consciousness? No, that is hard to believe - yet why not? - since we know so little of what we are, what, invisibly, we really are. It is as possible that there are a million different qualities of the consciousness that is all we are when we wake into a dark out of a deep sleep, and are unable to move for a while, let alone know where and why we are - as there are ten or five. But perhaps, Johor, when you look at this planet with your Canopus eyes, you do not see us as individuals at all, but as composites of individuals who share a quality that makes them, makes us, really, one. You look at us all and see not the swarming myriads, but sets of wholes, as we, looking into the waters of our lake, or up into the skies, saw there groups and swarms and shoals and flocks, each consisting of a multitude of individuals thinking themselves unique, but each making, as we could see with our superior supervising eyes, a whole, an entity, moving as one, living as one, behaving as one -thinking as one. Perhaps what you see of us is just that, a conglomerate of groups, or collectives, but these collectives need not be - it seems to me as I sit here thinking these thoughts, Johor, with you saying not a word - yet I would not be able
to have these thoughts or anything like them were you not here - it seems to me that the wholes or groups or collectives need not be geographically close or contiguous, but that perhaps an individual who has precisely the same feeling of herself or himself as I do when waking in the dark out of a deep dream, knowing nothing of his or her past, or history, all memories gone too, for just that brief space - this individual might be one I never meet, might be living in a city on the other side of the planet where I have not been nor ever will go now. Might be someone, even, that I dislike, or have a repulsion for, just as easily as someone I feel drawn towards - for this business of antipathy and likeness is a chancy thing, and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between attraction and repulsion, liking and disliking. But what a dimension that adds to the business of living, Johor, this idea of mine - this idea of yours ? - that as I go about my work and my business, looking after this or that, doing what has to be done, meeting a hundred people in a day, then of these people it is possible I am meeting, not strangers, not the unknown, but myself. Myself, all I know truly of myself, which is the feeling here I am, I am here, - all that is left of you when you wake in a thick dark with your limbs too weighty with sleep to move, and unable to remember what you are and what you are doing here or in what room you are waking. You said to me, Johor, that the terrible feeling of isolation and loneliness that comes over me when I understand that never, no matter how I tried, could I convey to any other being the atmosphere, the reality, the real nature of a dream landscape, those landscapes where we wander in our sleep and which are more real than our waking - this isolation must be softened, must be banished, by knowing that others too, must use these landscapes in their sleep, and meet me there, as I meet them, though we will never, perhaps - or seldom - know it when we meet in the day, and so, too, my loneliness is softened when I reflect that in saying I, here I am, here is what I am, this feeling or sensation or taste of me - I speak for... but I do not know how many. For others, that is certain. In that feeling of me-ness, is, must be, a sharing, must be a companionship. I shall not ever again wake from the deep sleep, like black water, in which I have been so terribly and marvellously trustingly submerged - as trustingly as these small animals snuggle up to us, giving their helplessness and littleness to us, who are so enormous and unknown to them - without thinking, as I feel again, Here I am, here is the consciousness of me, of those others, who are I, are myself, though I do not know who they are, nor they me... it is a strange thing, Johor, to feel oneself part of a whole much larger than oneself, to feel oneself vanishing as one thinks, or talks, dissolving into some core, or essence - and that inner central place dissolving too, going away, changing as one talks, or thinks, or contemplates, into something else... what then am I, Johor, sitting here on this heap of half-frozen sacks that smell so deliciously of that lost summer of ours, my body so briefly at rest inside this great hide coat, my mind full of thoughts that come from somewhere, float around there, as if I am a sort of sieve or catchment for thoughts that are part of me for a time and then drift past? I look at you and know that in seeing an uncomfortable, rather unhealthy, and pallid personage, not very unlike myself, I see nothing at all of you, know nothing: know, only, because my mind tells me so, that this is Canopus - and that is so far beyond my conception that I have simply to let it go at that. I sense myself, think of myself; and as I do this I dissolve, go away, am left with nothing, nothing, nothing - unless I am the wind that blows through the immense spaces that lie between electron and electron, proton and its attendants, spaces that cannot be filled with nothing, since nothing is nothing...' And down i sank again into sleep, where a dark restfulness and reassurance always waited for me, and from which I drifted up again, back to the cold shed, with Johor there. He was watching the little animals, all awake again. They were pulling open a sack with their sharp white teeth to get at the contents, and scattering the dried sprays and pieces of green and faded blue about on the ice, and scampering about among them, and playing and rolling. He watched, and he smiled, and he smiled at me as I came up from the dark saying to myself, Here am I, Doeg, and then: Here is the feeling of me that I share with my unknown friends, my other selves.

  Alsi was there too, so I saw then, sitting apart from us both. She was holding something between her large hands, which were ungloved, and bending forward over it, and mourning. One of the young animals was ill, or dying, and she was trying, with the vitality that still remained in her chilled hands, to revive it. She rocked as she sat, not knowing she did, back and forth, and from side to side, and I saw that this was a protest or a claim by her suffering much-tried body, a statement that a strong fighting life was still in it - just as much as it was an expression of the pain in her mind. And I thought again that bodies and minds were linked so closely, one affecting the other - yet in the wide spaces between the pulses that are the particles of the particles of the particles of the units of our physical being, there are no signs of - grief, for instance, or of love. Love, love, was grieving there in every small part of Alsi's large but gaunt body, for she knew, her terrible pain showed it was so, that this death meant others - the offspring of her two pets, these pretty delightful little babies, would soon be dead, for they could not endure their lives.

  'Do you realise, Johor,' she said to him, in the same heavy accusing way I sometimes used with him, 'that there are no young things left with us on our planet? The calves born during the summer to the herds have died, they were not strong enough, and no more are being born - and outside there in the pens there are only adults. I cannot make them breed, nothing I do will change what they are feeling - or what they know.' And she wept bitterly, her face close to the little furry creature in her cold hands, for it was quite dead, and stiffening.

  Johor said nothing, but watched her.

  When she had quietened herself, she said, still desperate, but in a low voice: 'What are we going to do? When the herds are gone, and the adults of the snow animals gone - there will be nothing for us all to eat. Oh, I shall be glad, glad, for I am so sickened by this meat we have to eat that the last mouthful I have to force myself to chew will be a celebration for me - even if it means the end of me...' But here I could see some thought had struck her, for her face changed, and her eyes did not see us for a time, but the eyes of her mind looked inwards. She sighed at last, and came back to us. Carefully she laid down the heavy cold lump in her hands that had so recently been the delightful little animal playing around us, and she looked long and steadily at another that had stopped playing and was sitting shivering close to her foot. She bent, stroked it gently, and her face had sorrow hardened into it, but she did not pick it up.

  'Alsi,' said Johor, T want you now to set aside Alsi and become Doeg.' She looked at him. We often enough changed our roles, did different kinds of work: becoming for those times the Representative for whatever it was that was needed, so it was no new idea to her that she should 'become Doeg', for she had 'been Doeg' quite recently, when it was her turn to remember and to reproduce in words experiences that we all needed to have fixed and set so that our annals would be in order. She had told of the journey made up in the lands of the ice to the colder pole, standing among us Representatives, while we listened carefully; and while this was being done, she was Doeg.

  'I want you to go back in your mind into your childhood, and tell of your feelings then, what you thought and how you saw your life.' And he picked up one of the still healthy young animals, which at once started to lick and bite his fingers playfully and to rub its nose and face against them, and he sat there with it lighdy caged, held before him on his knees. Its soft contented purring filled the icy shed, and its soft blue eyes blinked at us with the delighted recognition young things give to their discoveries: Oh, what a marvel this world is! How fantastic! Extraordinary! Wonderful! Look - what I can do with it! Watch me! And, held there among the thicknesses of Johor's coat, it put out a white paw to hook a flake of snow that had floated in somehow through the interstices of the roo
f, and then, as the flake vanished into the fur, the baby stretched and yawned, in a luxuriousness of pleasure in movement, and fell asleep as its muscles slackened, and dozed, in the most charming way, its chin on Johor's fingers.

  Johor looked gently at the girl, whose eyes were running hot tears. She pushed the hood back off her face, feeling it confine her, and then in the same impulse shrugged the coat off her shoulders. Under it she wore layers of the worn and ragged clothes of our warm and smiling days; and these too her hands tugged and ripped as if on their impulse, not hers, and she was sitting there half-naked in her nest of shaggy pelts.

  We did not see ourselves naked, these days; nor see the bodies of others. This was partly because of the terrible cold, and partly because of shame. I do not think that Alsi had intended to bare herself in this way, but she was being driven by grief. Her eyes were fixed on the little creature in Johor's hands, whose stillness now was not the moving breathing stillness of sleep, but had a stiffness about it. Her hands went out towards it in a wild unconscious gesture that said No, no, no, - I shall save you, and then withdrew themselves, and tugged again at her hair, and her eyes appeared in a fixed stare, between her fists.

  'Alsi,' said Johor - and laid down the little corpse beside him, on the frozen floor.

  'I was born - born, but I cannot remember, and you know that, but I suppose I gave pleasure to everyone, as this little beast has just done to us, because of my charm and my unconsciousness of it. And I grew - but I don't remember how, but it was under your command and in your care, Canopus, since that is the essence of our life and our being. And I knew more and more of myself, thinking more often every day: Here I am, this is Alsi -and my feeling of myself was not in my body so much then, though I delighted in it, but somewhere else... perhaps in you, Canopus - but then, it is not for us to know, is it? But I remember how I would come to myself, a young child, filled with wonder, and delight, and marvelling, just as this poor dead thing was, until a moment ago. And then, suddenly, something else happened, my breasts appeared and...'