a match, and make of Rohanda a planet that Canopus itself will wonder over and admire. On that lovely planet wait for us even now warm oceans, and sunny fields and pleasant forests full of fruit and hillsides where grain is gold and white and rippling green as the soft winds move. On Rohanda there are storehouses full of the soft light clothes that will cover us and the fresh light food we will eat and everything, everything, everything we will look at will be coloured, we will live again among the colours of living things, we will see the infinite shades of green, and yellow and red – our eyes will again be fed with scarlet and gold and purple, and when we look up into the deeps of the skies our eyes will fill with blue, blue, blue, so that when we look into each other’s eyes we will no longer see a crazed glare of white where colour has been bled out by whiteness, white, white, always white or grey or brown … yes, Canopus? Is that what you have come to tell us?’
‘No,’ he said at last.
‘Well then? How is Rohanda? Have you planned that another species, another of your genetic creations is to enjoy Rohanda?’
‘Canopus keeps its word,’ he said, though his voice sounded strange enough.
‘When it can?’ I said.
‘When it can.’
‘Well then?’
‘Rohanda has … suffered the same fate as Planet 8, though not as terribly and suddenly.’
‘Rohanda is no longer lovely and fruitful?’
‘Rohanda is … Shikasta, the broken one, the afflicted.’
And now it began to come into me, what he was saying, my whole self was absorbing it, and I stilled my indignation, my wild rejection of what he was telling me. I sat there in my thick wad of hide, and I heard a keening cry come out of me – the same that had come from the populations when we stood around the lake, our sacred place, and knew we were going to destroy it.
I could not still this lament, not at once, not for wanting to, because I was thinking of the thousands of low dark dwellings everywhere on our little world where our people huddled like beasts, dreaming of sunny days and soft winds – dreaming of Rohanda and of their regeneration.
Johor did not move away, or spare me, or himself. He continued to sit there, quite close, his face open to my eyes.
And when I was at last quiet he said: ‘And Canopus does keep its word.’
‘When you can.’
‘In one way if not in another.’
I knew perfectly well that the implications of this were too difficult for me to take in then. The words had that ring to them that words do when presenting to you for the first time truths with which you are going to have to become familiar – whether you want to or not! Oh yes, I was listening, and I knew it, to some new possibilities of growth being offered to me. Which I was going to have to aspire to … to grow towards … to take in.
But sorrowful indignation was still surging and sweeping in me, and I said to him: ‘On the other side of the planet, in Mandel, the great city, which we could emerge into if we could burrow straight through from here to there, is a civil war. They are killing each other. The dead are lying in heaps and mountains all around the city, because there is no way of burying them in the frozen soil, nor do we have any means of burning them for we have no fuel. The living – if you can call it living – go about what they have to do, surrounded by piles of their dead. And these are people who until such a short time ago did not have a word for murder. Or for war.’
He sighed – and suffered. But he did not turn his face away.
‘How are we going to tell them, Johor?’
He said nothing.
‘Are you going to tell them – you, Canopus? … No, for that is not your way. You will be with us for a little, and soon we, the Representatives, will understand that everyone knows it already, but we will not know how this has happened.’
And now I was silent a long while, for my mind seemed to want to open itself to something – I felt the pressure of some truth working there in its depths.
‘Johor, what is it I have to understand?’
‘Have you ever thought what being a Representative is?’
‘Do you imagine I have not lain awake at nights over it, have not thought, and wondered! Of course I have. That is what my life has been! Am I doing as I should for the best, making the good and proper decisions, working rightly and well with the other Representatives, expressing them as they …’
And my mind faded out again, into a place where truth was waiting for me.
‘As they express me?’ I asked at last.
‘How did you become a Representative? When was it? Can you remember?’
‘Funnily enough, it was only recently that I asked myself the same question. And it isn’t easy to say exactly when it was. But I suppose you could say it was when several of us youngsters were assigned to work on a new section of the wall. We had to dig out the earth for the foundations. About twenty of us. Well, I became a spokesman for all of us.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘That is what is hard to say. I feel it was probably a series of chances. Any one of them could have become spokesman, and at different times all of them were.’
‘Any one of them could have represented the others?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘And you were Masson, for that time?’
‘No, not yet – Masson was instructing us. At that time Masson was very many, because of having to get the wall built. We youngsters were apprenticed to Masson. Klin and Marl were there too, but that was before they became Klin and Marl. We had our family names still. We were not born into the adult world, there was no pressure on us yet to choose our adult names. The next time I represented others was at harvest, but we were taking it in turns to speak for everyone, and to allot tasks. And so it went on. I did all kinds of work, just like all the others. And all of us at various times were Representatives.’
‘Yet some of these young people grew up to be Representatives and others did not?’
‘Yes. I have been thinking about that. It is strange, for I can’t see that those who did not were so different. And as for myself, I did not see myself then as someone who would be a Representative. I think it was not until I was Doeg that I became truly a Representative. Klin and Marl and myself were taken by Canopus to Planet 10. We were not formally instructed, but taken everywhere around it to see how their people lived, and how differently things were done there. It was the people from Planet 10 who were instructing the Rohandans, you say – before things went wrong there. But we did not know when we visited Planet 10 that there was any special link between us and those people, or could have been. But of course we could see that they were much more developed than we were. And when we three came back from Planet 10, we were all Doeg, for then we travelled everywhere over our planet and told what we had seen. And everybody marvelled – for before that people had not been taken abroad from our planet to other places. I wonder why you chose us, Johor? I remember wondering then! Because we were in no way different from any of the others. Perhaps we had all three
