preserved fruits and vegetables. But mostly there were mountains of containers with some sort of pliable substance, and the Canopeans said they were for insulating our dwellings.
Were they not bearers of some other message? Nothing from Johor, for instance? Were we not to be given a time for our being finally rescued?
No, nothing of that kind – the space-fleet had been ordered to bring in these materials, and this is what had been done. And with that, the craft lifted up again into the skies and vanished.
The material for covering our houses was new to us. It was very thick soft easily manipulated stuff, and what we had to do was to make of it shells and hoods and coats for our dwellings. So light was this material that it was easy for a few people to cut, to fit together, and then to lift these shells over the buildings. We debated whether to cut windows in each carapace, but decided not to. For ventilation we had to rely on the opening and shutting of doors. Inside our homes now we crowded in a dark which was lit dimly by electricity that we supplemented when we could by lichen moulds soaked in tallow. Our world was now dark, dark, and always darker as the skies overhead became thicker and greyer. We woke in the stuffy dark that was warmed a little because of the press of bodies, and lit our little glimmers of light, or allowed ourselves the weakest trickle of electricity; and we went out into a world that showed a trace of brightness and light only far down towards the pole, where sometimes there was a little blue. From over the grey wall came driving the snow-laden winds. Now snow flurries played and smoked around the foot of our side of the wall, and tempests were common. And each bout of screaming winds seemed to drive us deeper down against the earth. Not all our buildings had been covered over with the insulating material. In some of our towns were buildings of as many as five or even six layers of function (I am aware of course that this will seem unimpressive to those of you who live on planets where buildings may be as tall as cliffs and mountains. I have seen such buildings myself.) These were too tall for us to be able to cover them over. Some hardy persons had elected to remain in them, but every storm emptied layer after layer, leaving perhaps a few people on the ground layer or on the one above that. And those who had been driven out of their high unprotected dwellings and working places massed together lower down, then were driven by force of numbers into joining families or groups or clans who perhaps had slightly more room than others. Thus adding to the overcrowding … to the tensions … to the always worsening moods and tempers of everybody. Rapidly worsening: having to put the heavy coverings over our living places had seemed to bring us all to a sudden new pitch of explosiveness. From everywhere came the news of the evidences of it.
‘There has been fighting on the other side of the planet.’
‘Fighting? Has someone been killed?’
‘Many. Very many.’
‘Many people have been killed? Why, did so many quarrels break out all at the same time?’
‘You see, groups of people have been fighting.’
‘Fighting against each other? Groups?’
‘Yes, groups, the people of one village fought another.’
‘But what for?’
‘Each village accused the other of the same bad behaviour.’
‘I don’t understand!’
Yes, that is how the news of our first battles was received by us. And this incomprehension persisted.
‘They are fighting between the mountains over there.’
‘Fighting? Who? What for? Have we been invaded, then? Have enemies come from the skies?’
‘No, no, the people in the land just past those foothills, you remember, where our young people used to journey to look for wives and husbands.’
‘How can they be fighting! What about?’
And then it was: ‘They are at war in the next valley.’
‘War?’
‘Yes, the villages there have divided themselves into two factions and are permanently armed against each other.’
‘Has anyone been killed?’
And so it went on. For a long time. Went on even when something of the kind happened among ourselves. Families that had been braving it out on the ground level of one of the unprotected buildings found that snow had covered the apertures; and they emerged and went from one to another of the neighbouring dwellings – and were turned away. Were refused in one place after another. Until they took up weapons of all kinds, stones and sticks, and even the implements used for killing the creatures of the lake, and forced their way into a habitation. There they stayed, a hostile and defensive clan, in one part of the dwelling, setting watchers to report the first sign of hostile retaliation. They slept and cooked food and went about their lives as a unit; and they were in a large room separated from their enemies by a single wall. And these threatened ones came with weapons to throw them out, and did succeed in expelling them. And again the homeless clan went from one place to another, trying to force entrance. Scuffling and fighting went on, all around the different dwellings, in a thick snowfall, which made it hard for them to see who were enemies and who friends. Then when they forced entrance, the invaders and invaded fought in the dimness and the dark of the interior spaces. We Representatives were sent for. The Representative for Housing and Sheltering went in to them, and insisted on the clan breaking itself up into ones and twos, and dispersed them among many households. We had not before had to divide a clan, let alone a family. We all understood this to be a new descent for us into unpleasantness and even danger. For the clan was our basic unit, and we felt it as our strength, our foundation as a people. Yet there was no alternative. We could not build new dwelling places. We did not have the materials. We could only make the best use of those we had.
It was not only the dispersal of some clans that threatened us in a new way. There was almost a rebellion: the clan had obeyed the Representative, but only just. Very easily could they have refused. We did not have the means to enforce our will on others. We had never thought of ourselves as separate from them. We had not envisaged having to make individuals or groups do what they bitterly resisted. Our strength was all in our election by them, to fulfil what we all knew was a general will, a consensus. If there was no agreement we could not function. If this group had said to our Representative: No, we will not! then there was nothing we could have done. It would have been the end of our way of life as a people.
We all knew that. And the fear of general anarchy was what, in the end, made the intruding clan agree to dissolve itself and go quietly off, though not willingly, to new households.
It was a time, still, that soon we would look back on as one of innocence, when we had not known our good fortune.
But our main concern was not for the worsening temper of our people, but for the threat from the ice, which groaned and squealed as the thickening masses bore down towards us, piling up above the wall so that it seemed to us we looked up at a mountain that was moving. We Representatives went together to a place near the wall where there was a gap in the shelf of ice above, and we climbed carefully up steps that were crumbling and dangerous. The surface of the wall was friable, and was cracking minutely into 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
